“Perley got a letter from your mother,” she said suddenly, “that he was reading in a corner of the post-office, and it nearly made him cry.”
There was no answer. She waited for a space and then said, projecting the remark into the heart of the fire,
“Yours must be a most interesting letter.”
She heard him move and looked quickly back at him, her face all gay challenge. It was met by a look so somber that her expression changed as if she had received a check to her gaiety as unexpected and effectual as a blow. She shrank a little as he came toward her, the letter in his hand.
“It is an interesting letter,” he said. “It’s from my wife.”
Since those first days of his illness, his wife’s name had been rarely mentioned. Rose thought it was because young Mrs. Ryan was a delicate subject best left alone; Dominick, because anything that reminded him of Berny was painful. But the truth was that, from the first, the wife had loomed before them as a figure of dread, a specter whose presence congealed the something exquisite and uplifting each felt in the other’s heart. Now, love awakened, forcing itself upon their recognition, her name came up between them, chilling and grim as the image of death intruding suddenly into the joyous presence of the living.
The change that had come over the interview all in a moment was startling. Suddenly it seemed lifted from the plane of every-day converse to a level where the truth was an obligation and the language of polite subterfuge could not exist. But the woman, who hides and protects herself with these shields, made an effort to keep it in the old accustomed place.
“Is—is—she well?” she stammered, framing the regulation words almost unconsciously.
“She’s well,” he answered, “she’s very well. She wants me to come home.”
He suddenly looked away from her and, turning to the chimneypiece, rested one hand upon it and gazed down at the logs. A charred end projected and he pushed it in with his slippered foot, his down-bent face, the lips set and brows wrinkled, looking like the face of a sullen boy who has been unjustly punished. An icy, invading chill of depression made Rose’s heart sink down into bottomless depths. She faltered in faint tones,