I started up, sharply stung by the unkind words. And then in the next moment, the flame of anger suddenly died in my heart, and I was conscious only of my miserable weakness and loneliness. Unawares, a little wailing cry escaped from my lips, and I sank helplessly into a chair, and wept quiet tears.
So bitter was my sorrow that it did not comfort me even to feel Ronald's hand on my shoulder, and hear his voice saying soothing words in my ear. We might make up this difference as we had made up others, but our innermost selves could not be changed. I did not want to quarrel; of all the silly things in this world, a quarrel between married people seemed to me the silliest and most useless. Wedlock (as I once heard a cynic say) is an iron chain covered with velvet, and those couples only are wise who keep the soft covering on the chain.
As for me, I loved my fetters, and felt that my heart would break with the breaking of a single link. But I feared that Ronald had already caught a glimpse of the iron under the velvet, and had begun to sigh for release.
"Don't cry, Louie," he was saying, penitently. "You do make me feel myself such a brute when you take to weeping. And, really, you have wept so much lately, that we seem to be always living in a damp atmosphere. Why shouldn't we bask in the sun sometimes? Look up, dear, and tell me that you will try to be bright."
He might as well have commanded a dying woman to make an effort to live. All that I could do was to wipe away the tears, and struggle feebly to produce a smile.
"Never mind me, Ronald," I answered, seeing the disappointed look in his face. "I shall get stronger and wiser by-and-by. Sit there, in your favourite corner of the sofa, and sing and play. That will do me more good than anything else."
He needed no second bidding; the guitar, as usual, was close at hand, and he began to touch it with loving fingers.
"What shall I sing?" he asked. "I know; it shall be your own song, 'Sweetheart, sweetheart,'—I like it better than any you have ever written."
"Yes," I said, eagerly; "I would rather hear that than anything else."
But even while I spoke, I remembered the days when I wrote those lines—days full of thankfulness, brightened by an intense belief in the immutability of our love.