“But I wonder if it is right of me to allow you to do this,” and her face was troubled. “Perhaps my first idea, to go myself, was best.”
“No, Mrs. Landray, you will wait here until I bring you word of him. Your idea was beautiful and devoted, but the very fact that you are a woman would stand in your way. So if any one goes, I must go. You can trust to my devotion, my friendship, where you could not trust another whose interest you had merely purchased. I shall go single hearted to find him; that will be my sole purpose.”
He felt exalted by the sacrifice to which he was committed. He wished it might be greater; then it would be the more worthy of her.
“I can only think of him as ill, with some terrible illness, or—or—” and speech failed her.
“I wish you could know all you have been to me; the comfort you have given. I don't mean now, I mean since that night when you brought me the letter.” She rose as she spoke and gathered her wraps about her.
“It is nothing—nothing,” he assured her, as he walked with her to her carriage.
“I will be patient,” she said as she bade him good-bye. “And though you will not hear of it, I am aware of the sacrifice you will be making for his sake.”
“For his sake,” repeated Benson slowly, as the carriage rolled away; and he turned back in the twilight that had fallen, and reentered the house.
I WONDER if she will never understand!” Benson asked himself, as he stood by the window and watched the carriage roll across the square and disappear down Main Street.
With the twilight, silence had fallen also; not that the town ever expressed itself with any accumulated volume of sound, but the score of teams that had stood hitched by the curb all day while their owners traded or gossiped, were now seeking the lonely country roads that led toward home.
In the half light, Benson saw vaguely outlined, the court-house, the jail, two newspaper offices, four dry-goods stores, one grocery, two saloons, and the tavern; the mere externals of middle West civilization at the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. Along the fences, in the gutters, and beneath the sheltering eaves of the houses, were dirty patches of melting snow and ice; mud and slush filled the street, and over all, between the changing grey clouds, the rising moon sent a faint uncertain radiance.