“When I have finished this business trip,” he declared fervently, “our separations shall end. They have been too many and too long—but I’ve paid for them in loneliness, dear. This call, that I’m answering now, is unexpected but it’s imperative and I can’t disobey it.”
She turned then, slowly and gravely, but with no lightening of the burdened anxiety in her eyes.
“It’s not just that you have to go away, Jack,” she told him. “It’s a great deal more than that.”
“What else is there, dearest?” His question was intoned with surprise. “When we are together, I have nothing else to ask of life. Have you?”
“The place has been changed—mightily changed,” she went on musingly as though talking to herself rather than to him. “And yet the walls are the same as they were that day—when we both thought we had to die here together.”
“They are the dearer for that,” he exclaimed fervently. “That was what made us see things truly.”
“I wonder,” she questioned, then meeting his eyes steadily she went on as though determined to say what must be said.
“When you called Brother Hawkins in to marry us, I was afraid. I was afraid because I thought you were only doing it out of kindness, and that afterward you’d be ashamed of me.”
“Ashamed of you,” he echoed with indignant incredulity. “In God’s name how could I be?”