same; with the same faint excuse, or with no
excuse at all. How we missed her about the house!--ay, changed as she
had been. How her husband wandered about, ghost-like, from room to
room!--could not rest anywhere, or do anything. Finally, he left our
company altogether, and during the hours that he was at home rarely
quitted for more than a few minutes the quiet bed-chamber, where, every
time his foot entered it, the poor pale face looked up and smiled.

Ay, smiled; for I noticed, as many another may have done in similar
cases, that when her physical health definitely gave way, her mental
health returned. The heavy burthen was lighter; she grew more
cheerful, more patient; seemed to submit herself to the Almighty will,
whatever it might be. As she lay on her sofa in the study, where one
or two evenings John carried her down, almost as easily as he used to
carry little Muriel, his wife would rest content with her hand in his,
listening to his reading, or quietly looking at him, as though her lost
son's face, which a few weeks since she said haunted her continually,
were now forgotten in his father's. Perhaps she thought the one she
should soon see--while the other--

"Phineas," she whispered one day, when I was putting a shawl over her
feet, or doing some other trifle that she thanked me for,--"Phineas, if
anything happens to me, you will comfort John!"

Then first I began seriously to contemplate a possibility, hitherto as
impossible and undreamed of as that the moon should drop out of the
height of heaven--What would the house be without the mother?

Her children never suspected this, I saw; but they were young. For her
husband--

I could not understand John. He, so quick-sighted; he who meeting any
sorrow looked steadily up at the Hand that smote him, knowing neither
the coward's dread nor the unbeliever's disguise of pain--surely he
must see what was impending. Yet he was as calm as if he saw it not.
Calm, as no man could be contemplating the supreme parting between two
who nearly all their lives had been not two, but one flesh.

Yet I had once heard him say that a great love, and only that, makes
parting easy. Could it be that this love of his, which had clasped his
wife so firmly, faithfully, and long, fearlessly clasped her still, by
its own perfectness assured of its immortality?

But all the while his human love clung about her, showing itself in a
thousand forms of watchful tenderness. And hers