"Oh, no, I've never had any trouble of that kind, thank God. Ours are all well and strong. By the way, Forest, our train goes in a little over an hour. I suppose we'll have dinner before we go—it's tea here, I believe, in the evening. Doesn't suit me altogether, either—I've had a new kind of life since I began taking dinner in the evening," as he rose from his chair and began to move restlessly about.
I glided away noiselessly like one in a dream. My heart was leaden, and I thought it was all for love of Gordon and dread of what might thus befall him. My principal thought, as I remember, was of his relation to his work—and his position—and his future. Yet I know now that what gave me the deepest pain was a trembling fear lest those things should slip from me—as from him—the things I reckoned the foundation stones of the life that was so happy now. Without knowing it, ever since that night I saw Jennie die, the secret between my heart and Christ had been growing more rich and full. I esteemed Him the meeting-place whereon Gordon and I had found each other; and I feared, though I could not have put it into words, that distance from Him would mean distance from each other. Perhaps it was wrong; perhaps these two passions of my heart should have been reverently kept separate—but they were blended and intertwined in a union that was altogether holy.
I kissed Harold gently as I bended over his bed and tucked him in an hour later; he stirred in his sleep as my hot tears fell upon his face. Then I knelt beside him—I remembered how my mother used thus to kneel by me—and I prayed, pleadingly, in the new-found way that had grown so dear. My pleading was all for Gordon, passionate in its intercession, as though he were drifting out to sea, and God alone could bring him back.
I was hardly risen from my knees when Gordon came home. He came at once to where I was; and he smiled in that happy way he had, whenever he saw me bending over Harold. It always seemed to delight him so.
"You're an idolater, Helen, aren't you?" he said.
I clung to him in a very spasm of fondness, as if he were slipping from me. My heart cried out in a wild, hungry way, though my lips were still. I wanted to call him back, back to the shelter where our life's happiness began.
"And I don't blame you, dear," he went musingly on as he looked down on the rosy face; "life is all preface till you have children, isn't it?—the real volume comes after that."
"I could die for him," I said. (This was with a purpose. I was trying, for the first time, a lesson in theology. It struck me with a kind of amusing pain, my poor attempt to teach Gordon—Gordon so learned, so clever.)
"So could I," he murmured.
"It makes me understand how—how One died for us all," I faltered, coming to my point with desperate directness. How the angels must have smiled if they heard my first attempt at preaching! "It helps me understand how love and suffering must go together—God can't help it any more than we. If I were a preacher, Gordon, I'd preach that all the time."