Honor felt beforehand, that the active life which lay untouched in the future for her, was to be sweeter, and happier far, than the passive existence of her girlhood. Matrimony, in her eyes, was a state of such sublime responsibilities, that she could spare her thoughts to no other consideration during these dreary hours of anxious solitude.
She spent her whole days in sketching the hereafter, just as she would have it. Already she was planning her wifely duties, and asking herself how she should learn to be always as interesting and as dear to her husband as she was to her lover. She invented modes of amusement and distraction, that would make home cheerful and fascinating for him, resolving within herself, that, if it lay in woman's power, to attract and bind a man's heart to his fireside, in preference to the old haunts of his pleasures, she would do it.
Two days of close, concentrated, uninterrupted thought, did not leave Honor unchanged. Her face grew serious in its beauty, her step was slower, her conversation less gay, and the distraction of visiting a sick-room, caused no happy re-action to her pensiveness.
It was now the twenty-seventh of December, a wet, rainy, raw day, fine, straight lines of persistent rain fell with a dreary drip on the snow's hard crust, pedestrians with their frozen umbrellas, slipped and slid along in ill-humor; shop-girls and others, who were out from sheer necessity, sped along with smileless faces, and frozen ulster-tails, sulking as they jerked from one icy elevation to another in the flooded slippery walk, and raising their upper lips in ungraceful curves, as their straightened curls stood out in painful stiffness, or fell in wet, clinging bits over their eyes.
Honor shuddered, and shrugged her shoulders as she turned away from the window, and threw herself into a large chair beside the lounge whereon was the sleeping form of her invalid guardian. The girls' face wore a look of dread and anxiety, something of painful impatience hovered around her mouth, and her eyes looked tired and sad, as she laid her head languidly back among the cushions.
"How long he sleeps!" she murmured anxiously, "I don't like this listlessness that has come over him lately; he dozes now all the time." Then springing quietly up, she stole over to the low couch, and stooped down beside the sleeping figure, she rested her chin thoughtfully in her hand and looked earnestly and lovingly into his face. The eyes were only half closed, the breathing was loud and labored, now and then the lips moved convulsively, as if in an effort to speak. Something so unnatural and so forboding dwelt on his kind, dear features, that a racking pain seized the girl's heart as she looked, her throat filled up, and hot, blinding tears welled into her eyes.
What is there sadder or more painful, than the quiet, tearful vigils that some dear one keeps by the sick bed of the unconscious invalid. With scalding tears in her eyes, and a burning misery in her heart, the sorrowful mother stoops over the doomed form of her sleeping child, gently chafing the fevered hands, tenderly cooling the flushed and fevered brow; softly pressing the trembling lips on the clammy cheek of her darling, driving back her agony with a heroic cruelty, lest a sob or a sigh, or a falling tear disturb the quiet slumber of the little one she loves. A mother and her child, a wife and her husband are never drawn so closely together, one never seems so truly a part of the other, as during a moment like this. It seems her baby has never looked so fair, so faultless in its mother's eyes, as when 'tis viewed through the blinding tears, that its sufferings and illness have brought into those searching eyes. A husband's follies and trifling neglects are never so generously forgiven and forgotten, as when, on bended knee, the wife he has loved peers greedily, devouringly into the shadowy face, when clouded by suffering and pain and so it is through all the grades of binding love we never know how dear our parent, brother, sister, friend or lover is, until we have watched the weakened forms struggling with some dread disease, the filmy eyes are then so full of mute appeal, the faint accents of the poor weak voice thrill our hearts with sympathy and love, the pressure of the feeble hand is most powerful in drawing us back, soul to soul, and heart to heart, as though neither of us had ever done such a very human thing, as to wrong one another. Honor tried to think, while she watched through her tears, what it would be to live, without this precious friend forever nigh, to guide and comfort her. In all the days of their happiness together, they had never spoken of the time when a separation must come the farthest flight her fancy ever took, into the distant future, still found her existence blended with Henry Rayne's. To her, he was now no older, no weaker than he was that day, long ago, when first she laid her eyes upon him; and now the horrible possibility of a cruel separation, thrust itself between her tears and the quiet unconscious face before her.
While she watched, sunk in a melancholy reverie, the bell of the hall door gave a great ring, which startled her suddenly, it also awoke the sleeper who looked vacantly into the tear-stained face, and smiled sadly. Honor got on her knees, and looked anxiously at the worn features "How do you feel, my dearest?" she said with an effort to be calm, "Any better?"
"I shall soon be better than I ever was before," he answered quietly, but so seriously that Honor suspected the terrible meaning of his words.
"Don't you feel at all livelier or stronger?" she asked in a despairing tone. "You know you were so down-hearted yesterday. Do say you feel a little relieved?" But before he could answer, Fitts appeared in the doorway, with the letters and packages of the morning delivery. Two were for Honor, and all the rest were Henry Rayne's. She had only given a careless glance at hers, but that sufficed to make her heart beat a great deal faster, and her eyes to sparkle suspiciously. Stooping over the figure of the invalid, she kissed the heated brow gently, and went out, leaving him with his important correspondence. She stole down to the library and gathered herself into a great easy chair, and then, drawing her letters deliberately from her pocket, she broke their seals and straightened out their creases. One was a delicate little note from a girl-friend, which, at any other time, would have been a pleasant distraction, but which was now refolded and replaced in its dainty envelope, unappreciated and uncared for. The other—oh, the other! with its dear familiar outlines, looking almost lovingly into her eyes—"My darling Honor," just as his voice pronounced it. Her hands trembled slightly while they held the quivering sheet, from which she read in silent rapture. When she had finished, and looked at it, and examined it over and over again, she dropped her hands carelessly in her lap and said half aloud.