"Forgive me, my friend," returned Thorpe, quickly. "I—" Then he paused. "As I was saying," he went on, after a little, "I have often envied you."
"Don't," said Dexter, again. "As you were also saying, distance hides the peak and you do not see the scars."
Thorpe's eyes sought the picture of Dexter's wife with an evident tenderness, mingled with yearning. "I often think," he sighed, "that in Heaven we may have a chance to pay our debt to woman. Through woman's agony we come into the world, by woman's care we are nourished, by woman's wisdom we are taught, by woman's love we are sheltered, and, at the last, it is a woman who closes our eyes. At every crisis of a man's life, a woman is always waiting, to help him if she may, and I have seen that at any crisis in a woman's life, we are apt to draw back and shirk. She helps us bear our difficulties; she faces hers alone."
Dexter turned uneasily in his chair. His face was inscrutable. The silent moment cried out for speech—for anything to relieve the tension. Through Ralph's letters Evelina's eyes seemed to be upon him, beseeching him to speak.
"I knew a man,", said Anthony Dexter, hoarsely, "who unintentionally contracted quite an unusual debt to a woman."
"Yes?" returned, Thorpe, inquiringly. He was interested.
"He was a friend of mine," the Doctor continued, with difficulty, "or rather a classmate. I knew him best at college and afterward—only slightly."
"The debt," Thorpe reminded him, after a pause. "You were speaking, of his debt to a woman."
Dexter turned his face away from Thorpe and from the accusing eyes beneath Ralph's letters. "She was a very beautiful girl," he went on, carefully choosing his words, "and they loved each other as people love but once. My—my friend was much absorbed in chemistry and had a fondness for original experiment. She—the girl, you know—used to study with him. He was teaching her and she often helped him in the laboratory.
"They were to be married," continued Dexter. "The day before they were to be married, he went to her house and invited her to come to the laboratory to see an experiment which he was trying for the first time and which promised to be unusually interesting. I need not explain the experiment—you would not understand.