Perhaps also we shall help each other and others around us better for having been thus trained apart. I used to dream of the joy of leading her into life. But now God gives her back to me enriched with all those years of separate experience, not as the Eva of childhood, when I saw her last, but ripened to perfect womanhood; not merely to reflect my thoughts, but to blend the fulness of her life with mine.
XXVII.
Eva's Story.
Wittemberg, January, 1525.
How little idea I had how the thought of Fritz was interwoven with all my life! He says he knew only too well how the thoughts of me was bound up with every hope and affection of his!
But he contended against it long. He said that conflict was far more agonizing than all he suffered in the prison since. For many years he thought it sin to think of me. I never thought it sin to think of him. I was sure it was not, whatever my confessor might say. Because I had always thanked God more than for anything else in the world, for all he had been to me, and had taught me, and I felt so sure what I could thank God for could not be wrong.
But now it is duty to love him best. Of that I am quite sure. And certainly it is not difficult. My only fear is that he will be disappointed in me when he learns just what I am, day by day, with all the halo of distance gone. And yet I am not really afraid. Love weaves better glories than the mists of distance. And we do not expect miracles from each other, or that life is to be a Paradise. Only the unutterable comfort of being side by side in every conflict, trial, joy, and supporting each other! If I can say "only" of that! For I do believe our help will be mutual. Far weaker and less wise as I am than he is, with a range of thought and experience so much narrower, and a force of purpose so much feebler, I feel I have a kind of strength which may in some way, at some times even help Fritz. And it is this which makes me see the good of these separated years, in which otherwise I might have lost so much. With him the whole world seems so much larger and higher to me, and yet during these years, I do feel God has taught me something, and it is a happiness to have a little more to bring him than I could have had in my early girlhood.
It was for my sake, then, he made that vow of leaving us for ever!
And Aunt Cotta is so happy. On that evening when he returned, and we three were left alone, she said, after a few minutes' silence—