MIRAGE.
“This spoils some of your arrangements, doesn’t it?” asked Dr. Sevier of Richling, stepping again into his carriage. He had already said the kind things, concerning Reisen, that physicians commonly say when they have little hope. “Were you not counting on an early visit to Milwaukee?”
Richling laughed.
“That illusion has been just a little beyond reach for months.” He helped the Doctor shut his carriage-door.
“But now, of course—” said the physician.
“Of course it’s out of the question,” replied Richling; and the Doctor drove away, with the young man’s face in his mind bearing an expression of simple emphasis that pleased him much.
Late at night Richling, in his dingy little office, unlocked a drawer, drew out a plump package of letters, and began to read their pages,—transcripts of his wife’s heart, pages upon pages, hundreds of precious lines, dates crowding closely one upon another. Often he smiled as his eyes ran to and fro, or drew a soft sigh as he turned the page, and looked behind to see if any one had stolen in and was reading over his shoulder. Sometimes his smile broadened; he lifted his glance from the sheet and fixed it in pleasant revery on the blank wall before him. Often the lines were entirely taken up with mere utterances of affection. Now and then they were all about little Alice, who had fretted all the night before, her gums being swollen and tender on the upper left side near the front; or who had fallen violently in love with the house-dog, by whom, in turn, the sentiment was reciprocated; or whose eyes were really getting bluer and bluer, and her cheeks fatter and fatter, and who seemed to fear nothing that had existence. And the reader of the lines would rest one elbow on the desk, shut his eyes in one hand, and see the fair young head of the mother drooping tenderly over that smaller head in her bosom. Sometimes the tone of the lines was hopefully grave, discussing in the old tentative, interrogative key the future and its possibilities. Some pages were given to reminiscences,—recollections of all the droll things and all the good and glad things of the rugged past. Every here and there, but especially where the lines drew toward the signature, the words of longing multiplied, but always full of sunshine; and just at the end of each letter love spurned its restraints, and rose and overflowed with sweet confessions.
Sometimes these re-read letters did Richling good; not always. Maybe he read them too often. It was only the very next time that the Doctor’s carriage stood before the bakery that the departing physician turned before he reëntered the vehicle, and—whatever Richling had been saying to him—said abruptly:—
“Richling, are you falling out of love with your work?”
“Why do you ask me that?” asked the young man, coloring.