Looking at her bowed head he saw it all—the complete overthrow, the rich field of life rendered barren waste. Barren waste—but was that true for Ernestine? Did there not remain for her the scent of the field? The memory of that glorious, luxuriant growth? With him barren waste—but for her did there not grow in the field of life some things which were everlasting? With the quickness with which he saw everything he saw that it was the picture of his own barrenness could show her most surely the things which for her remained.
He drew back from the thought as one draws away from the rude touch upon a wound. Lay bare the scars of his life that another profit by their ugliness? Years of habit were against it; everything fundamentally himself was against it. But he was a man who had never yet shrunk from the thing he saw was right to do. The cost of an accomplishment never deterred him from a thing he saw must be accomplished. With each second of listening to her sobs, he was becoming once more the man who masters, the man ruthless and unsparing in his purposefulness.
"Ernestine," he began, and his voice was very strange, for it knew it was to carry things it had never carried before, "you and I are similarly placed in that we have both lost the great thing of life. But there is something remains to each of us. Life has left something to us both. To you it has left a rose jar. To me—a heap of ashes."
It came with the moment's need. It comprehended it so well the channels long closed seemed of themselves to open. In the clearness with which he saw it, the fullness with which he felt it, he lost himself.
"Do you know that you have no right to cry out against life? Do you know that there are men and women who would lay down their lives—yes, and give up their immortal souls—for hours which you have had? Do you know that you have no right to say Karl Hubers was mocked by fate, made sport of, buffetted about? Do you know,"—his face went white as he said this, slowly—"that I would be a thousand times willing to give up my two eyes—yes, and lay down my life—just to know, as he knew, that love was great and life was good?"
The tears remained undried upon her cheek. He held her.
"Look deeper. There is another way to read Karl's life—a deeper truth than those truths you have been seeing.
"Ernestine, we all dream of love; we all desire it. It is only at rare, rare times it comes as it came to you. And I say to you—and I mean it from the bottom of my heart—that if you had been forced to give up your love in the first hour of its fulfillment, for all that you should thank God through the remainder of your life that it had been yours. For you had it!—and nothing, loss, death, defeat, disappointment of every kind, can strip from your soul the consciousness that once, no matter for how short a time, love in its fullness and perfection was yours. Long, lonely years may come, and all hard things may come, but through it all the thing to keep your soul in tune is the memory of some one perfect hour."
Stillness followed that, the stillness which was silence. She had not moved.
"You dreamed your dream,"—and in his voice now the beautiful things of appreciation and understanding. "I know your dream. You dreamed of growing old together; of taking from life everything there was together; of achieving to the uttermost; of rejoicing in each other's victories, growing more and more close together. I know your dream—a beautiful dream. Giving up some things as the changing years do their work, and taking on the other things, the more quiet, in fact finer things, that come with the years. Oh, yes—don't think I do not know that dream. To walk together down the years, meet them fearlessly, gladly, in the thought that they but add to the fullness of your love—I know—I know. And now that it is not to be as you thought, you say life has left nothing to you; that you hate it; will have none of it. Oh, Ernestine, if you could only know how rich you are!"