I thank thee!

* * * * *

Once more we sat on the steps. The bewitching beauty of the August night
lay around us. The yellow harvest moon sailed on as calmly as though it
were used to beholding lovers. I held her hand in a kind of stupefied
satisfaction, feeling as though under the spell of some powerful opiate.
She was so close to me!--the skirt of her gingham gown had fallen over
one of my feet. I touched her hair, so tenderly, and smoothed it back
from her pure forehead. How could it be? This young creature, so full of
life and health, encompassed with all that wealth and love could
give--to love me!--me, a simple bookworm and lover of Nature, who had
come into her life by chance. The golden hours of that enchanted night
still glow like letters of fire upon the web of memory. It was the one
perfect period in my quiet and uneventful existence,--the one brief time
when life was full, and I held to my lips the cup of all earthly
happiness. And the changing years cannot rob me of the recollection.

XV

The next day Salome was seized with a severe headache. She did not leave
the house, and of course I did not see her, as she stayed in her room
upstairs. We felt no especial concern, although she was not accustomed
to such attacks, and with the coming of night her head grew easier. I
went out after supper to pace up and down the avenue, to smoke my pipe,
and to watch the windows of her room. I remained in the yard till nearly
eleven, and the light was still burning when I went in. The next morning
Mrs. Grundy told me that Salome had some fever, and that a doctor had
been sent for. I heard the news in silent fear, and my heart sank. I
longed to tell this good old woman what her daughter was to me; but
Salome had said nothing about it, and I could not speak without her
consent.

The doctor came, an important-looking young fellow whom I felt inclined
to kick off the porch the moment he set foot on it. When he descended
from the sick room he pompously announced that it was only an ordinary
cold, which would quickly disappear before the remedies which he had
left. But the days went by, and she grew no better, and I never saw her.
How my heart hungered for a glance of her sweet face; how my eyes longed
to look into the clear, brown depths of hers. One morning I was told
that a leading physician from Louisville had been summoned. Dr. Yandel
came--and stayed. Typhoid fever is a grim foe