“Why, to say the truth, it has been worn without much thought any way; but if you will look at it, you will see that it has saved my life by breaking the force of a ball.”
“It has certainly suffered considerably,” said Klemm, as he gazed at the crushed medal.
“It is strange,” said Klemm, some days afterward, when dressing the wounds of Adolph, “that you should wear a religious medal on your neck, and appear to be inattentive to services for which such things are worn, and even indifferent to the motives for which this particular one was given.”
“Do you know the motive?” said Adolph.
“You told me some days since, that it was rather a token of love than religion.”
“In which I think it proper to say I was wrong.”
“You awaken in me a curiosity by your remarks which I certainly have no right to expect will be gratified.”
Adolph, whose fault of character it was to yield to immediate influences, professed himself willing to explain, desiring it to be understood, however, that the names he should use with regard to the absent, should be fictitious. “My own follies are justly visited on me, but I have no right to connect respectable names with mine in this situation.”
Adolph, changing the name of the village and that of Madam Berien’s family, related to Klemm the circumstances of his life—his love for Louise, his irreligious habits, his restoration to propriety, his call to the army, and added that the evil associations of the camp had obliterated not only the sense of respect which he had begun to feel for religion, but it had really led him back to skepticism; and his life in the army had of late been in accordance with his want of belief.
“Of course,” said Klemm, “you retain your affection for things and persons of this world, notwithstanding your loss of belief in the doctrines that relate to that which is to come?”