"When you come again I shall take you out to see it, and we shall walk softly up to the shelf where it stands—so carefully, to keep from jarring a single leaf—and we shall separate the branches, still very carefully, to look down at the little new stems. And, Jim—Jim—the blossoms will be like starry young eyes looking up at us! The pink, faintly-showing glow will be as delicate as a tiny cheek, when sleep has flushed it—and the petals will close over our fingers with all the clinging softness of a helpless little clutch!
"We will be very happy for a little while, but, because I am savage and resentful over our delayed joy, I shall cry on your shoulder and say it's cruel—cruel—that you and I have only this plant to love together."
After this came two or three more, like it, then I reached for one which brought a misty wetness to my eyes. The lover was gone—quite gone—and the woman had seemed to feel that they would meet no more.
... "At other times I remember all the months which have gone by since then—and the miles of dark water which roll between your land and mine. God pity the woman who has a lover across the sea!
"Am I sorry that I sent you away? You ask me this—yet how can you! How many letters I have written, bidding you, nay begging you to come back—how many times have I dropped them into the post-bag in the hall—then, after an hour's thought, have run in terror and snatched them out again!
"I am trying so hard to be good! Can I hold out—just a little while longer? I am going to die young, remember, and that is the one hope which consoles me! It used to be that I shrank from the medical men who told me this—who told me with their pitying eyes and grave looks—but now I welcome their gravity. Sir Humphrey Davy has written a letter to my husband, advising him to send me off to Italy for this incoming winter—but I shall not go! 'I fear that dread phthisis in the rigor of English cold,' he writes—but for me it can not come too soon!
"... Yet all the time the knowledge haunts me that our lives are passing! I can not bear it! I spend the hours out in the garden—where the sun-dial tells me—all silently—of the day's wearing on.
"Since you went away I can not listen to the sound of the clock in the hall. That chime—that holy trustful chime—'O Lord, our God, be Thou our Guide,' shames the unholy prayer on my lips.
"Then the clock ticks, ticks, ticks—all day—all night—on, and on, and on—to remind me of our hearts' wearying beats! Does this thought ever come to madden you? That our hearts have only so many times to throb in this life—and when we are apart every pulsation is wasted?"
I thrust this letter back into its place—then hastily closed down the desk. The sensation of reading a thing like that is not pleasant. She had written with an awful, awful pain in her heart—and she had lived before the days of anesthetics!