Conclusion.
The wounded man was removed to Robert’s home. The attendant physician looked grave; he was dealing with a tremendous enemy that assaulted with sapping and draining of strength, with poisoning of the blood and brain. But he was young and fresh in his wrestle with evil in disease; he had the latest words of science; he knew how to work, so he called up all his powers, and neither slumbered nor slept.
He left the room for only brief intervals, and allowed no one in there except the servant. Occasionally the patient slept, and then he rested, too. A whistle from a rushing train far out in the night, or carriages rolling home from late pleasures, were welcome sounds to break the stillness, though how foreign to Robert and Cherokee they seemed. Full of solicitude, full of anxiety, they came to the door at all hours to ask of the patient’s condition. Time and time again they were turned away without a comforting answer.
At last, one day, the physician told them he would live and be himself in health again. Sweetly fell these words, like dew on dying flowers—their hearts’ throbbing chords were softly soothed.
* * * * * *
They were sitting together in their own room. Robert’s face had greatly changed.
“Cherokee,” he began, “it isn’t long ago that I promised, before God, to love and cherish you always. I have learned that that didn’t mean just to-day, or a year from to-day. It meant this: that we must make the fulfillment of our sacred promise to each other the supreme effort of our lives, so long as we both live. I know I have erred, but I promised Marrion on that terrible night that I would be a man. It is two years, to-day, since he risked his own life to save you and me. Tell me, have I kept the faith?”
He held out his hand in a half pleading gesture; she put her’s on his shoulders, and throwing her head back with the exuberant happiness of a child, said, with enthusiasm:
“You have! you have! and I do—do love you.” She glanced over his shoulder into the mirror. Was the bright face she saw there her very own? What had become of its sallowness, its lines of care, its yearning melancholy?
A wave of golden consciousness sweetly swept her face. In the fulness of contentment, long withheld, Cherokee’s glad youth had come back to reward her husband.
Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.