"I wish I knew," she said. "I wish I knew!"
"Have you ever thought what it will mean," he said, "if we adopt the other alternative? Have you thought of the desolation and loneliness of growing old and helpless and finally—" He stopped, and she threw out her hands as if to ward off the thoughts he called before her.
"Oh, yes, yes, I have thought, and it is terrible. I keep remembering a picture I saw in the French Exhibit. It was of a man and a woman; the woman was dead, and he had dug her grave, his broken sword lay at his side, and he had wrapped her in his coat, and begun to cover her over. He could not go on, and knelt, looking at her with a despair on his face that has haunted me ever since. The name, Manon Lescaut, meant nothing to me then, but the story of the picture was enough by itself. All last year I kept seeing that terrible picture. Sometimes it was you, sometimes it was I, that dug the grave and went mad looking into it."
"I should not bury you," said Adam, grimly. "I should carry you to the cliff and take you in my arms and jump. The sea is deep and cruel there."
"Sometimes," she hesitated a moment, then went on,—"sometimes I think that would be the best way for us now, I mean if we decide we have no right to be happy in the old way; for I should be afraid we could not always be strong."
"Very well," he answered; "when we decide, it shall be literally life or death."
XX
The ant and the moth have cells for each of their young, but
our little ones lie in festering heaps in homes that consume
them like graves; and night by night, from the corners of
our streets, rises up the cry of the homeless,—"I was
a stranger and ye took me not in."
Ruskin.
For a time they busied themselves with different things about their little home, worked in the garden, and held a round-up of their stock that they might know the extent of their wealth; and because, in a life quite apart from human beings, animals come to take their place to a greater extent than might seem possible.
It was a very pleasant time. Everything seemed so gentle, so willing to be friends, and so certain of their good-will.