“There will be no explanations,” said Paul, not coldly, but helplessly.
“Much the best way,” said the doctor relieved, and glad to be done with a difficult undertaking. “If we are ever understood in this world, it is not through our own explanations, but in spite of them. My daughters hope to see a good deal of your charming wife this winter. I hear great pleasure expressed at your coming back to town.”
“Thank you, Doctor. She will be up this evening. We shall stay here with my mother for a time. It will be her desire to carry out this—recognition—to the end. We must honor her wishes in the matter.”
The talk then fell upon the patient's condition. The doctor left certain directions and took shelter in professional platitudes, but his eyes rested with candid kindness upon the young man, and his farewell hand-clasp was a second prolonged.
He went away in a state of simple wonderment, deeply marveling at Paul's serenity.
“Extraordinary poise! Where does it come from? No: the boy is happy! He hides it; but it is the one change in him. He has experienced a great relief. Is it possible”—
On his way down the river the doctor continued to muse upon the dignity, the amazingly beautiful behavior of this rising family in whose somewhat commonplace city fortunes he had taken a friendly interest for years. He owned that he had sounded them with too short a line.
Watching with the dying man hours when she was with him alone, Emily Bogardus continued to test his resolution. He never retracted by a look—faithful to the word she had spoken which made them strangers.
It was the slightest shell of mortality that ever detained a soul on earth. The face, small like the face of an old, old child, waxed finer and more spiritual, yet ever more startlingly did it bear the stamp of that individuality which the spirit had held so cheap—the earthly so impenetrated with the spiritual part that the face had become a sublimation. As one sees a sheet of paper covered with writing wither in flame and become a quivering ash, yet to the last attenuation of its fibre the human characters will stand forth, till all is blown up chimney to the stars.