In his own room, upstairs?" The
three passed through an inner door.

CHAPTER XLI.

MIRAGE.

"This spoils some of your arrangements, doesn't it?" asked Dr. Sevier of
Richling, stepping again into his carriage. He had already said the kind
things, concerning Reisen, that physicians commonly say when they have
little hope. "Were you not counting on an early visit to Milwaukee?"

Richling laughed.

"That illusion has been just a little beyond reach for months." He
helped the Doctor shut his carriage-door.

"But now, of course--" said the physician.

"Of course it's out of the question," replied Richling; and the Doctor
drove away, with the young man's face in his mind bearing an expression
of simple emphasis that pleased him much.

Late at night Richling, in his dingy little office, unlocked a
drawer, drew out a plump package of letters, and began to read their
pages,--transcripts of his wife's heart, pages upon pages, hundreds of
precious lines, dates crowding closely one upon another. Often he smiled
as his eyes ran to and fro, or drew a soft sigh as he turned the page,
and looked behind to see if any one had stolen in and was reading over
his shoulder. Sometimes his smile broadened; he lifted his glance from
the sheet and fixed it in pleasant revery on the blank wall before
him. Often the lines were entirely taken up with mere utterances of
affection. Now and then they were all about little Alice, who had
fretted all the night before, her gums being swollen and tender on the
upper left side near the front; or who had fallen violently in love with
the house-dog, by whom, in turn, the sentiment was reciprocated; or
whose eyes were really getting bluer and bluer, and her cheeks fatter
and fatter, and who seemed to fear nothing that had existence. And the
reader of the lines would rest one elbow on the desk, shut his eyes in
one hand, and see the fair young head of the mother drooping tenderly
over that smaller head in her bosom. Sometimes the tone of the lines
was hopefully grave, discussing in the old tentative, interrogative
key the future and its possibilities. Some pages were given to
reminiscences,--recollections of all the droll things and all the good
and glad things of the rugged past. Every here and there, but especially
where the lines drew toward the signature, the words of longing
multiplied, but always full of sunshine; and just at the end of each
letter love spurned its restraints, and rose a