You told me once--you--when I asked you what death meant, that it was nothing to be feared, if we did no harm--Aha! mother, you thought I had forgotten that!' His merry laugh and playful manner smote her to the heart.

She drew him closer to her, and besought him to talk to her in whispers and to be very quiet, for it was getting dark, and their time was short, and she would soon have to leave him for the night.
'You will come to-morrow ?' said Barnaby.
Yes.

And every day.

And they would never part again.
He joyfully replied that this was well, and what he wished, and what he had felt quite certain she would tell him; and then he asked her where she had been so long, and why she had not come to see him when he had been a great soldier, and ran through the wild schemes he had had for their being rich and living prosperously, and with some faint notion in his mind that she was sad and he had made her so, tried to console and comfort her, and talked of their former life and his old sports and freedom: little dreaming that every word he uttered only increased her sorrow, and that her tears fell faster at the freshened recollection of their lost tranquillity.
'Mother,' said Barnaby, as they heard the man approaching to close the cells for the night,' when I spoke to you just now about my father you cried "Hush!" and turned away your head.

Why did you do so?
Tell me why, in a word.