“I am so glad,” said Lily.
She took another stitch in her fancy-work, and her beautiful face took on an almost seraphic expression; she was thinking of George Ramsey. She hardly noticed when the doctor took his leave, and she did not in the least understand her mother's sigh when the door closed. For her the gates of love were wide open, but she had no conception that for her mother they were not shut until she should go to heaven to join her father.
Chapter XX
The next evening Maria, as usual, went to church with her two aunts. Henry Stillman remained at home reading the Sunday paper. He took a certain delight in so doing, although he knew, in the depths of his soul, that his delight was absurd. He knew perfectly well that it did not make a feather's weight of difference in the universal scheme of things that he, Henry Stillman, should remain at home and read the columns of scandal and politics in that paper, instead of going to church, and yet he liked to think that his small individuality and its revolt because of its injuries at the hands of fate had its weight, and was at least a small sting of revenge.
He watched his wife adjust her bonnet before the looking-glass in the sitting-room, and arrange carefully the bow beneath her withered chin, and a great pity for her, because she was no longer as she had been, but was so heavily marked by time, and a great jealousy that she should not lose the greatest of all things, which he himself had lost, came over him. As she—a little, prim, mild woman, in her old-fashioned winter cape and her bonnet, with its stiff tuft of velvet pansies—passed him, he caught her thin, black-gloved hand and drew her close to him.
“I'm glad you are going to church, Eunice,” he said.
Eunice colored, and regarded him with a kind of abashed wonder.
“Why don't you come, too, Henry?” she said, timidly.
“No, I've quit,” replied Henry. “I've quit begging where I don't get any alms; but as for you, if you get anything that satisfies your soul, for God's sake hold on to it, Eunice, and don't let it go.” Then he pulled her bonneted head down and kissed her thin lips, with a kind of tenderness which was surprising. “You've been a good wife, Eunice,” he said.
Eunice laid her hand on his shoulder and looked at him a second. She was almost frightened. Outward evidences of affection had not been frequent between them of late years, or indeed ever. They were New-Englanders to the marrow of their bones. Anything like an outburst of feeling or sentiment, unless in case of death or disaster, seemed abnormal. Henry realized his wife's feeling, and he smiled up at her.