As it seems to me that the conversation is taking a painful direction, I try to divert it by telling my news; but the bloom is again taken off it by the old man, who declines to be disabused of the idea that the Peninsular is still raging, and that it is Roger's _grandfather_ who is returning from that field of glory. After a few more minutes, during which the old wife composedly tells me of all the children she has buried--she has to think twice before she can recollect the exact number--and in the same breath remarks, "How gallus bad their 'taters were last year," I take my departure, and leave the old man still nodding his weak old head, and chuckling to the kettle.

On first leaving the house, I feel dashed and sobered. The inertness and phlegmatic apathy of dry and ugly old age seem to weigh upon and press down the pa.s.sionate life of my youth, but I have not crossed a couple of ploughed fields and seen the long slices newly ploughed, lying rich and thick in the sun; I have not heard two staves of the throstle's loud song, before I have recovered myself. I also begin to sing. I am not very harmonious, perhaps, I never am; and I wander now and then from the tune; but it is good enough for the stalking geese, my only audience, except a ragged jacka.s.s, who, moved by my example, lifts his nose and gives vent to a lengthy bray of infinite yearning.

I am half-way home now. I have reached the wood--Brindley Wood; henceforth I am not very likely to forget its name. The path dips at once and runs steeply down, till it reaches the bottom of the dell, along which a quick brook runs darkling. In summer, when the leaves are out, it is twilight here at high noonday. Hardly a peep of sky to be seen through the green arch of oak and elm; but now, through the net-work of wintry twigs one looks up, and sees the faint, far blue, for the loss of which no leaf.a.ge can compensate. Winter brownness above, but a more than summer green below--the heyday riot of the mosses. Mossed tree-trunks, leaning over the bustling stream; emerald moss carpets between the bronze dead leaves; all manner of mosses; mosses with little nightcaps; mosses like doll's ferns; mosses like plump cushions; and upon them here and there blazes the glowing red of the small peziza-cups.

I am still singing; and, as no wind reaches this shadowed hollow, I have taken off my hat, and walk slowly along, swinging it in my hand. It is a so little-frequented place, that I give an involuntary start, and my song suddenly dies, when, on turning a corner, I come face to face with another occupant. In a moment I recover myself. It is only Frank, sitting on a great lichened stone, staring at the brook and the trees.

"You seem very cheerful!" he says, rising, stretching out his hand, and not (as I afterward recollect) expressing the slightest surprise at our unlikely rencontre. "I never heard you lift up your voice before."

"I seem what I am," reply I, shortly. "I _am_ cheerful."

"You mostly are."

"That is all that _you_ know about it," reply I, brusquely, rather resenting the accusation. "I have not been _at all_ in good spirits all this--this autumn and winter, not, that is, compared to what I usually am."

"Have not you?"

"I _am_ in good spirits to-day, I grant you," continue I, more affably; "it would be very odd if I were not. I should jump out of my skin if I were quite sure of getting back into it again; I have had _such_ good news."

"Have you? I wish _I_ had" (sighing). "What is it?"

"I will give you three guesses," say I, trying to keep grave, but breaking out everywhere, as I feel, into badly-suppressed smiles.

"Something about the boys, of course!"--(half fretfully)--"it is always the boys."

"It is nothing about the boys--quite wrong. That is _one_."

"The fair Zephine is no more!--by-the-by, I suppose I should have heard of that."

"It is nothing about the fair Zephine--wrong again! That is _two_!"

"Barbara has got leave to stay till Easter!"

"Nothing about Barbara!"--(with a slight momentary pang at the ease and unconcern with which he mentions her name).--"By-the-by, I wish you would give up calling her 'Barbara;' she never calls you 'Frank!' There, you have had your three guesses, and you have never come within a mile of it--I shall have to tell you--_Roger is coming back!_" opening my eyes and beginning to laugh joyously.

"_Soon?_" with a quick and breathless change of tone, that I cannot help perceiving, turning sharply upon me.

"_At once!_" reply I, triumphantly; "we may expect him _any day_!"

He receives this information in total silence. He does not attempt the faintest or slightest congratulation.

"I wish I had not told you!" cry I, indignantly; "what a fool I was to imagine that you would feel the slightest interest in any thing that did not concern yourself personally! Of course" (turning a scarlet face and blazing eyes full upon him), "I did not expect you to _feel_ glad--I have known you too long for that--but you might have had the common civility to _say_ you were!"

We have stopped. We stand facing each other in the narrow wood-path, while the beck noisily babbles past, and the thrushes answer each other in lovely dialogue. He is deadly pale; his lips are trembling, and his eyes--involuntarily I look away from them!

"I am _not_ glad!" he says, with slow distinctness; "often--often you have blamed me for _hinting_ and _implying_ for using innuendoes and half-words, and once--_once_, do you recollect?--you told me to my face that I _lied_! Well, I will not _lie_ now; you shall have no cause to blame me to-day. I will tell you the truth, the truth that you know as well as I do--I am _not_ glad!"

Absolute silence. I could no more answer or interrupt him than I could soar up between the dry tree-boughs to heaven. I stand before him with parted lips, and staring eyes fixed in a stony, horrid astonishment on his face.

"Nancy," he says, coming a step nearer, and speaking in almost a whisper, "_you_ are not glad either! For once speak the truth! Hypocrisy is always difficult to you. You are the worst actress I ever saw--speak the truth for once! Who is there to hear you but me? I, who know it already--who have known it ever since that first evening in Dresden! Do you recollect?--but of course you do--why do I ask you? Why should you have forgotten any more than I?"

Still I am silent. Though I stand in the free clear air of heaven, I could not feel more choked and gasping were I in some close and stifling dungeon, hundreds of feet underground. I think that the brook must have got into my brain, there is such a noise of bubbling and brawling in it.

Barbara, Roger, Algy, a hundred confused ideas of pain and dismay jostle each other in my head.

"Why do you look at me so?" he says, hoa.r.s.ely. "What have I done? For G.o.d's sake, do not think that I blame you! I never have been so sorry for any one in my life as I have been for you--as I was for you from the first moment I saw you! I can see you now, as I first caught sight of you--weariness and depression in every line of your face--"

I can bear no more. At his last words, a pain like a knife, sharp to agony, runs through me. It is the grain of truth in his wicked, lying words that gives them their sting. I _was_ weary; I _was_ depressed; I _was_ bored. I fling out my arms with a sudden gesture of despair, and then, throwing myself down on the ground, bury my face in a great moss cushion, and put my fingers in my ears.

"O my G.o.d!" I cry, writhing, "what _shall_ I do?--how _can_ I bear it?"

After a moment or two I sit up.

"How _shameful_ of you!" I cry, bursting into a pa.s.sion of tears. "What sort of women can you have lived among? what a hateful mind you must have! And I thought that you were a nice fellow, and that we were all so comfortable together!"

He has drawn back a pace or two, and now stands leaning against one of the bent and writhen trunks of the old trees. He is still as pale as the dead, and looks all the paler for the burning darkness of his eyes.

"Is it possible," he says, in a low tone of but half-suppressed fury, "that you are going to _pretend_ to be surprised?"

"_Pretend!_" cry I, vehemently; "there is no pretense about it! I never was so horribly, miserably surprised in all my life!"

And then, thinking of Barbara, I fall to weeping again, in utter bitterness and discomfiture.

"It is _impossible_!" he says, roughly. "Whatever else you are, you are no fool; and a woman would have had to be blinder than any mole not to see whither I--yes, and _you_, too--have been tending! If you meant to be _surprised_ all along when it came to this, why did you make yourself common talk for the neighborhood with me? Why did you press me, with such unconventional eagerness to visit you? Why did you reproach me if I missed one day?"

"_Why did I?_" cry I, eagerly. "Because--"

Then I stop suddenly. How, even to clear myself, can I tell him my real reason?

"And now," he continues, with deepening excitement, "now that you reap your own sowing, you are _surprised--miserably surprised_!"

"I am!" cry I, incoherently. "You may not believe me, but it is true--as true as that G.o.d is above us, and that I never, _never_ was tired of Roger!"

I stop, choked with sobs.

"Yes," he says, sardonically, "about as true. But, be that as it may, you must at least be good enough to excuse me from expressing _joy_ at his return, seeing that he fills the place which I am fool enough to covet, and which, but for him, _might_--yes, say what you please, deny it as much as you like--_would_ have been mine!"

"It _never_ would!" cry I, pa.s.sionately. "If you had been the last man in the world--if we had been left together on a desert island--I _never_ should have liked you, _never_! I _never_ would have seen more of you than I could help! There is _no one_ whose society I grow so soon tired of. I have said so over and over again to the boys."

"Have you?"

"What good reason can you give me for preferring you to him?" I ask, my voice trembling and quivering with a pa.s.sionate indignation; "I am here, ready to listen to you if you can! How are you such a desirable subst.i.tute for him? Are you n.o.bler? cleverer? handsomer?

unselfisher?--if you are" (laughing bitterly), "you keep it mighty well hid."

No reply: not a syllable.

"It is a _lie_," I cry, with growing vehemence, "a vile, base, groundless lie, to say that I am not glad he is coming back! Barbara knows--they _all_ know how I have been _wearying_ for him all these months. I was not _in love_, as you call it, when I married him--often I have told him that--and perhaps at Dresden I missed the boys a little--he knows that too--he understands! but now--_now_--" (clasping my hands upon my heart, and looking pa.s.sionately upward with streaming eyes), "I want no one--_no one_ but him! I wish for nothing better than to have _him--him only_!--and to-day, until I met _you_--till you made me loathe myself and you, and every living thing--it seemed to me as if all the world had suddenly grown bright and happy and good at the news of his coming."

Still he is silent.