s dead as the
poor little wife! So long as he was alive, you were a big help to him.
He was miserable enough no doubt, poor beggar, but the last extremity of
despair was spared him by your love and care. I'd swear to that! But
that Martin died, and with him your power.

"Thus far, and no farther! There's a wall, Katrine, between the soul of
every brother and sister who was ever created, and sooner or later they
come up against it. All the love, and the care, and the patience, and
the trying and crying can never scale it. And then one day comes along
a vagrant who _doesn't_ cry, doesn't try, perhaps doesn't even care, and
before that stranger is an open road. Which is a mystery, dear, and a
commonplace. Likewise cussedly unfair.

"Do you mind if I call you `dear'? It's only on paper, and it's so long
since I've had any one to endear. It takes off a bit of the loneliness
to feel that there is some one in the world to whom one can occasionally
show a glimpse of one's heart. It's the only bit of me that has a
chance of feeling cold out here--but it's petrifying fast enough. If
you object, if it shocks your sense of decorum, well!--I'll write it all
the same, but I'll blot it out afterwards. You needn't know anything
about it. Pens _will_ blot on this thin paper!

"Don't worry yourself because you are not the world and all to Martin.
He would be an odd fellow if you were. It's not in nature that a sister
should satisfy a man's heart, and it's no use bucking against nature.
Neither need you worry because of his discontent. If you'd ever
suffered from a big wound, you'd understand that at the first, one is
numbed by the shock; it's only when the knitting up and rebuilding begin
that the pain bites deep. Look upon his restlessness and depression as
growing pains, and the beginning of his cure. Poor little Katrine! but
this sort of thing is confoundedly hard on the looker-on.

"You want to know about myself--and why your eyes look sorry as they
watch me turn out on my lone. Well, you know, Katrine--I am--I _was_,
thirty-five last birthday; only child, parents gone, relations
scattered, strangers to me in all but name. Outside the regiment there
is not a soul to count in my life, and at the end of four years, unless
the impossible happens, I must leave the regiment and say good-bye to my
friends. They offered me a majority in the Blankshire a year ago, but I
couldn't bring myself to face the wrench, but as