“Well,” replied Amos gravely, “it would be very nice; but just now I have a rather important matter I want to talk to Julia about, if she will just spare me a few minutes, and come with me to my aunt’s room.”
“Dear me! what can you want with me?” asked his sister, turning deep red and then very pale. “I’m sure I don’t want to talk about anything dismal this delicious morning. Oh! don’t look so serious, Amos; you are always in the dolefuls now. Why can’t you be cheerful and jolly, like Walter?”
“I am sorry to trouble you,” replied her brother, “but there is a cause just now. I shall not keep you long, and then you can return to your jollity if you will.” These last words he uttered in a tone of reproach which touched her spite of herself.
She rose and followed him in silence to her aunt’s room. When all were seated, Amos produced the Scripture reader’s letter, and, expressing his deep sorrow to have to wound his sister, read it slowly out in a subdued voice. Julia sprang from her seat, and having snatched the letter from her brother’s hand, read it through several times, her bosom heaving and her eyes flashing, and a few tears bursting forth now and then. “It’s a hoax,” she cried at last; “one of his hoaxes. It can’t be true.”
“I fear it is true,” said Amos calmly. “To me the letter bears all the marks of truth.—Don’t you think so, Aunt Kate?”
“Yes, surely,” replied Miss Huntingdon sadly; “I cannot doubt its genuineness.”
Julia then tossed the letter to her brother and sat down. “And what is it, then,” she asked bitterly, and with knitted brows, “that you want me to do?”
“I think, dear Julia,” said her aunt, “the real question is, What is it your duty to do?”
“Oh yes,” she cried passionately; “my duty! Duty’s a very fine thing. It’s always ‘duty, duty.’ But there are two parties to duty: has he done his duty? He has beaten me, starved me, cursed me—is that doing his duty? And now I am to go and nurse him in a vile fever-smitten hole, and lose my life, and so deprive my children of a mother, because it’s my duty. I don’t see it at all.”
Both her hearers looked deeply distressed. Then Amos said, “Still he is your husband, and dying.”