“Are you content?”
“Quite content,” he murmured. “So content, that I want nothing in this wide world.”
And by his look his wife knew that this was true.
“Agatha, darling, you have been crying? Come and sit here.”
She came—making a minute's pretence of smiles, and then fell on his neck, weeping,
“Oh! I don't deserve to be so happy—so very happy!”
“Child,” he answered, with a grave tenderness, “if we went by desert, who among us would deserve anything? Should I, who was so hard and cold towards my poor little wife, when, if I had said one word out of my real heart, and not kept it down so proudly—Ah! I was very wicked. I, too, did not deserve that God should save me from death, and bring me home to my dear wife's love. Darling! don't let us talk of deservings; only let us try to be good, and always, always love one another.”
Oh, the heavenly silence of that embrace, the life of life, that was in it! Now for the first time the bond of full and perfect love was drawn round the husband and wife, sacredly shutting them in from the world without, which could never more come between them, or intermeddle with their sorrows or their joys.
At length Agatha freed herself gently from his clasp, saying, after her old habit of hiding emotion under a jest, something about the impossibility that the mistress of a household could idle away her time in this way. She made her husband's breakfast, and insisted on watching him finish it.
Drinking, he said with a shudder, “Oh, Agatha, you don't know what it is to be thirsty! The hunger was nothing to it.”