“Oh, Jane!—Oh, my dear!” He could only whisper the words. “And I have—to leave you!”
“Yes. Good-bye——” she said again, steadily.
He let go one of her hands, and with his strong fingers made her loosen one gripped fist. Then—the other.
“I can’t bear to see them like that,” he said, with a queer, tortured smile. “I want——” And he lifted first one palm and then the other to his lips, and then gently closed the fingers again. “Don’t hold them so tight again—please!” he said. “I don’t want to have to remember them—that way. Jane—I don’t know how to go!”
“You must. Doctor Burns is waiting for you. Don’t mind about me.”
“Don’t mind about you!” It was a cry of pain. “Why—you’re all I do mind about—now. I’ve done all the things I had to do to-day—they’re all done—everything’s done—but this. And this—why, this—is so much the hardest thing of all——”
How could he speak at all, she wondered, when she could not? She did not realize that expression of one sort or another was the breath of his life to-day. That having poured himself out, all day, to others, he could not cease from giving; that though to-morrow might bring upon him a silence and an immobility as great as her own, for to-day his lips must have speech; his spirit, action.
“Jane—you won’t deny me—I can’t go without it. God knows our hearts—knows——”
He left his own heart on her lips then, in one bitter-sweet moment of such spending as he had never known—or she—and went away, leaving her alone there in the deserted shop with the memory of his whispered, “God bless you—my Jane!” She ran to the window, screening herself from view as best she could, and saw him get into the car, and saw the car leap away down the narrow street.
An hour later she was at the station. Black had not been in the car when it had come for her; it was full of other people—the Macauleys and the Chesters, Red’s neighbours and among Black’s best friends. Mrs. Burns explained that the minister’s new guard, the boys who were to enlist to-morrow, had come for him in a body, and had borne him away in the biggest car they had been able to find.