“Certainly they are,” replied Richling. “I lie sometimes and think of men who have been political prisoners, shut away from wife and children, with war raging outside and no news coming in.”
“Think of the common poor,” exclaimed Dr. Sevier,—“the thousands of sailors’ wives and soldiers’ wives. Where does that thought carry you?”
“It carries me,” responded the other, with a low laugh, “to where I’m always a little ashamed of myself.”
“I didn’t mean it to do that,” said the Doctor; “I can imagine how you miss your wife. I miss her myself.”
“Oh! but she’s here on this earth. She’s alive and well. Any burden is light when I think of that—pardon me, Doctor!”
“Go on, go on. Anything you please about her, Richling.” The Doctor half sat, half lay in his chair, his eyes partly closed. “Go on,” he repeated.
“I was only going to say that long before Mary went away, many a time when she and I were fighting starvation at close quarters, I have looked at her and said to myself, ‘What if I were in Dr. Sevier’s place?’ and it gave me strength to rise up and go on.”
“You were right.”
“I know I was. I often wake now at night and turn and find the place by my side empty, and I can hardly keep from calling her aloud. It wrenches me, but before long I think she’s no such great distance away, since we’re both on the same earth together, and by and by she’ll be here at my side; and so it becomes easy to me once more.” Richling, in the self-occupation of a lover, forgot what pains he might be inflicting. But the Doctor did not wince.
“Yes,” said the physician, “of course you wouldn’t want the separation to be painless; and it promises a reward, you know.”