It was a pleasant day of the last of May, in the mating season of birds, when the world was warm and throbbing with young life. The eminent Asiatic scholar looked across the lunch table, regarding his wife with wistful sadness as she refreshed herself with boiled cabbage.
“Do you know the day? It is thirty years since Hilsenhoff went into the box; thirty years since we have been man and—woman.”
“Ah, yes, this is the anniversary. Thirty years, thirty years. Poor young Hilsenhoff.”
She said these words with a tinge of sadness that was almost regret and this did not escape the doctor.
“One might fancy you were sorry. Yet it was your own doing. I was young and handsome then. A Hercules, young, full of life, late champion swordsman of the university, a rising light in the realm of learning, as well as a figure in society. You were the beautiful wife of tutor Hilsenhoff, the buxom girl with the form of a Venus and the passion of that goddess as well, tied to a thin, pallid bookworm ten years your senior, neglecting his pouting wife with blood full of fire for the pages of the literature of Hindoostan, prating of the loves of Ganesha and Vishnu, when a goddess awaited his own neglectful arms. So when on the day when he stepped into the box, leaving us the sole repository of the secret of his whereabouts—that the mutton-headed police might not interfere with the success of his experiment by preventing what they might think practically suicide—you said to let him stay.”
“I was twenty and he thirty,” mused the woman. “Poor young Hilsenhoff.”
“Young! I was twenty-three—and a man.”
“Dead or alive, he is young Hilsenhoff to me. He was thirty when last I saw him.”
“Dead or alive? What are you thinking of?”
An idea had been taking shape in the woman’s mind without her realizing it. It had grown from her own words, rather than had the words sprung from the idea.