“Your wife?” repeated Larry, in staring surprise.
“You did not know I was married? I knew it at the time, as the boy said,” and John Manning smiled bitterly.
“Where is she?” was Larry’s second query.
“Here.”
“Here?”
“In this house. You shall see her before you go. And after the funeral I want you to get her away from here with what speed you can. Sell this house for what it will bring, and put the money into government bonds. You may find it hard to persuade her to move, for she seems to have a strange liking for this place. She breathes freely in the deadly air that suffocates me. But you must not let her remain here; this is no place for her now that a new life and new duties are before her.”
“How was it I did not know of your marriage?” asked Larry.
“I knew nothing about it myself twenty-four hours before it happened,” answered John Manning. “You need not look surprised. It is a simple story. I had this shot through the breast at Gettysburg last Fourth of July. I lay on the hillside a day and a night before relief came. Then a farmer took me into his house. A military surgeon dressed my wounds, but I owed my life to the nursing and care and unceasing attention of a young lady who was staying with the farmer’s daughter. She had been doing her duty as a nurse as near to the field as she could go ever since the first Bull Run. She saved my life, and I gave it to her—what there was of it. She was a beautiful woman, indeed I never saw a more beautiful—and she has a strange likeness to—but that you shall see for yourself when you see her. She is getting a little rest now, for she has been up all night attending to me. She will wait on me in spite of all I say; of course I know there is no use wasting effort on me now. She is the most devoted nurse in the world; and we shall part as we met—she taking care of me at the last as she did at the first. Would God our relation had never been other than patient and nurse! It would have been better for both had we never been husband and wife!” And John Manning turned his face to the wall with a weary sigh; then he coughed harshly, and raised his hand to his breast as though to stifle the burning within him.
“It seems to me, John, that you ought not to talk like that of the woman you loved,” said Laurence Laughton, with unusual seriousness.
“I never loved her,” answered Manning, coldly. Then he turned, and asked hastily, “Do you think I should want to die if I loved her?”