"I'm going mad," Alva exclaimed, springing from the bed; "why did I leave him? No matter what they said, I should have stayed there. My place was there. Oh, I have been cast in so many moulds these last years; I have taken so many prizes, only to find them dust in my hands; and now God will not—must not take this one from me! I have learned the folly of the material, I have bent my head beneath the yoke enough to be spared another lash of the goad. I pray—oh, I pray—that this cup may pass me by."
Lassie sat still, now quite terrified.
Alva paced up and down the little room. "I have been dragged—or I have managed to drag myself—up one step above the ordinary. I had accepted the loneliness that comes when one gets where no one else stands. I learned not to expect companionship. But we are not the less lonely because we go our way alone,—we are not the less lonely. And that same rule holds all through. Lassie, I tell you, that one does not crave companionship the less because one chooses to marry a dying man; one does not crave caresses the less when one loves as I do." She wrung her hands miserably. "I'm weak—weak—weak! This is the test and I am failing. I, who have worked so far, am being carried down—down—down—now—to-night. Oh, the struggle, the tragedy, the lesson! Life's lessons are always so terrible." Then, her emotions seeming for the moment to exhaust all her strength, she came back to the bed, and said, with some approach to calmness:
"Perhaps it is that I preached too much to you, dear, or was too sure of myself. Perhaps my joy was a selfish joy, or perhaps I did wrong in planning to leave my parents, even for a little while. Just in proportion as one rises, so do the subtlety of their problems increase. To love a man whose life was too big for any one to share unless she could give herself wholly—that was hard but I learned that lesson; I would have given my life wholly. Then to have my duty chain me away from him—that was terrible but I accepted that, too. Then to have him struck down—I thought that that was the worst of all, but something held me up through that. But—but," she broke out in a wail of absolute, heartbroken desolation, "but if he is going to leave me before we—" and there she stopped short, shivered violently, and became stilly rigid.
Lassie dared to put her arms about her.
"Why do you think such dreadful things? You don't know that anything has happened."
Alva drew a long, sharp breath. "But I do know it," she said; "something has happened. You will see in the morning. Oh, I would have given up my life while he was giving up his, and minded it so little; but to have to give him up! What shall I do? I wanted those weeks, even if they shrank to days—to hours. It seemed to me that we had earned the right to a little, so little, happiness. The memories would have given me strength to bear the hereafter. If I could only be a soul, and a brave one, like him,—but to-night I am all heart, all quivering fear." She paused to control her voice again.
"But, Alva, let me give you back your own speeches in comfort. How often you've told me how only his soul counted, and how that was yours for eternity, and how, because of that, you found yourself equal to all things. And you've told me, too, dear, how his renunciation, how his exchange of power, strength and life for weakness and death—and all without a murmur—made you quite confident that you would never fail, either."
"Yes," Alva murmured, "yes, I remember, but—"
"And you said that the way that he ignored his poor, crushed body and looked straight towards another future life of fresh labor made you full of courage, too. You remember."