To a few of us, they are ladders, by which we climb to God; hills, that lift us nearer heaven--that heaven, which, however certainly--with whatever mathematical precision--it has been demonstrated to us that it exists not here, nor there, nor yet anywhere, we still dimly, with yearning tears and high longings, grasp at.

Barbara has always looked heavenward.

In all her mirth, God has mixed.

Now, therefore, in this grief that He has sent her--this ignoble grief, that yet cuts the none less deeply for being ignoble, and excluding the solace of human sympathy, she but thrusts her hand with a fuller confidence in his, and fixes her sweet eyes with a more reverent surety on the one prime consoler of humankind, who, from his Cross, has looked royally down the toiling centuries--the king, whom this generation, above all generations, is laboring--and, as not a few think, _successfully_--to discrown.

To her, his kingship is as unquestioned as when heretics and paynims burnt to prove it.
Often, since then, in those vain longings that come to each of us, I suppose, I tried in after-days--sometimes I try now, to stretch my arms out wide-backward toward the past--to speak the words that would have been as easily spoken then as any other--that no earthly power can ever make spoken words now, of sympathy and appreciation to Barbara.
I did say loving things, but they seem to me now to have been but scant and shabby.