She shook her head in a doubtful way. “No, I think not—that is, not irrevocably. But he has worked too hard. He has broken down under the strain. We are going away for a long journey—to rest, and forget about the System.”
He bent his head to look into her eyes—trusting his glance to say the things which his lips shrank from uttering. A window stood open, and they passed out upon a broad stone terrace, shaded and pleasant under a fresh breeze full of forest odors.
“Oh—the System”—he ventured to say, as they stood alone here, and she lifted her head to breathe in the revivifying air—“I felt always that it was too much for one man. The load was too great. It would crush the most powerful man on earth.”
She nodded reflective assent. “Oh, yes—I’m afraid I hated it,” she confessed to him, in a murmur full of contrition.
“But he is going away now,” urged Christian, hopefully. “You will have him to yourself—free from care, seeing strange and beautiful new places—as long as you like. Ah, then soon enough that gaiety of yours will return to you. Why, it is such a shock to me to think of you as sad, depressed—you who are by nature so full of joy and high spirits. Ah, but be sure they will all return to you! I make no doubt whatever of that. And Emanuel, too—he will get rested and strong, and be happy as he never was before—the dear fellow!”
She smiled at him in wan, affectionate fashion. “All the courage has gone out of me,” she said. “Will it be coming back again? God knows!”
“But surely——” Christian began, with hearty confidence.
She interrupted him. “What I am fearful of—it is not so much his health, strictly speaking—but the terrible unsettling blow that all this means to him. It is like the death of a beautiful only child to the fondest of fathers. It tears his heart to pieces. He loved his work so devotedly—it was so wholly a part of his life—and to have to give it up! He says he is reconciled. Poor man, he tried with all his strength to make himself believe that he is. I catch him forcing a smile on his face when he sees me looking at him—and that is the hardest of all for me to bear. But I don’t know”—she drew a long breath, and gazed with a wistful brightening in her eyes at the placid hills and sky—“it may work itself out for the best. As you say—when we get away alone together, ah, that is where love like ours will surely tell. I do wrong to harbor any doubts at all. When two people love each other as we do—ah, Christian, boy, there’s nothing else in all the world to equal that!”
He inclined his head gravely, to mark his reverential sympathy with her mood.
“Ah, but you know nothing of it at all,” she went on. “You’re just a lad—and love is no more to be understood by instinct than any other great wisdom. Millions of people pass through life talking about love—and they would stare with surprise if you told them they never had had so much as a glimmer of the meaning of it. They use the name of love in all the matings of young couples—and there’s hardly once in a thousand times that it isn’t blasphemy to mention it. Do you know what most marriages are? Life-sentences! If you have means and intelligence, you make your prison tolerable; you can get used to it, and even grow dependent upon it—but it is a prison still. The best-behaved convict eyes his warder with a cruel thought somewhere at the back of his mind. Do you remember—when you left us the first time, I begged you to be in no haste to marry?”