nd masculinely obtuse he
had been in dealing with this beautiful and tender thing, which God
had once, for a short time, intrusted to his keeping! How cruel and
wooden that moral code of his by which he had relentlessly judged her,
and often found her wanting! What an effort it must have cost her
finer-grained organism to assimilate his crude youthful maxims, what
suffering to her tiny feet to be plodding wearily in his footsteps
over the thorny moral wastes which he had laid behind him! All this
came to him, as by revelation, as he sat gazing into Emily's face,
which looked very pathetic just then, with its vague bewilderment and
its child-like surrender of any attempt to explain what there was
puzzling in the situation. Storm was deeply touched. He would fain
have spoken to her out of the fulness of his heart; but here again
that awkward morality of his restrained him. There were,
unfortunately, some disagreeable questions to be asked first.

Storm stared for a while with a pondering look at the floor; then he
carefully knocked a speck of dust from the sleeve of his coat.

"Emily," he said at last, solemnly. "Is your husband still alive?"

It was the bluntest way he could possibly have put it, and he bit his
lip angrily at the thought of his awkwardness.

"My husband," answered Emily, suddenly recovering her usual flute-like
voice (and it vibrated through him like an electric shock)--"is he
alive? No, he is dead--was killed in the Danish war."

"And were you very happy with him, Emily? Was he very good to you?"

It was a brutish question to ask, and his ears burned uncomfortably;
but there was no help for it.

"I was not happy," answered she simply, and with an unthinking
directness, as if the answer were nothing but his due; "because I was
not good to him. I did not love him, and I never would have married
him if mother had not died. But then, there was no one left who cared
for me."

A blessed sense of rest stole over him; he lifted his grave eyes to
hers, took her listless hand and held it close in his. She did not
withdraw it, nor did she return his pressure.

"Emily, my darling," he said, while his voice shook with repressed
feeling (the old affectionate names rose as of themselves to his lips,
and it seemed an inconceivable joy to speak them once more); "you
must have suffered much."

"I think I have deserved it, Edmund," she answered with a little pout
and a little quiver of her upper lip. "After al