“You’ve always been such a friend of mine, I—I—I’ve never said much about how I feel about it. I haven’t got anything I wouldn’t sooner part with, Martha.”
“I hope so,” she said gently, and bowed her head in a kind of meekness. “I hope so, Dan, but——” She stopped.
“I’m afraid,” she said slowly, “your wife isn’t going to like me.”
“Oh, but she will,” he returned, trying to put heartiness into this assurance. “She’s bound to! Why, everybody in the world likes you, Martha.”
“No; I had the feeling as soon as I spoke to her that she never would, Dan. It was just a feeling, but I’m afraid it’ll turn out so. That doesn’t mean I won’t try my best to make her.”
“You won’t need to try. Of course just now she’s suffering so terribly, poor little thing——”
“Poor Dan!” Martha said, as he stopped speaking and sighed instead. “You never _could_ bear to see anybody suffer. The trouble is it always makes you suffer more than the person that’s doing the original suffering.”
“Oh, no. But I don’t know what on earth to do for her. Of course, in a few days, when she begins to see what it’s really _like_ here, and I get her to understand a little more about the Addition——”
He stopped, startled to hear his name called in a querulous little voice from an upstairs window.
“Who on earth are you talking with out there?” called the querulous voice.
“Good-night,” he whispered, moving away hurriedly; but, looking back, he saw that Martha remained at the separating iron fence, leaning upon it now; and he could feel, rather than see, that she was not looking at him, but that her head was again bowed in the same meekness with which she had said she hoped he prized her feeling for him.
THE doleful bride remained in bed all the next day, prostrate under the continuing heat;—in fact, it was not until a week had passed that she felt herself able to make the excursion projected by the hopeful bridegroom; and when they finally did set forth, in Dan’s light runabout, she began to suffer before they reached the gates of the carriage driveway.
“Oh, dear!” she said. “Is it going to be bumpy like this all the way? It hurts my back.”
Dan apologized. “I’m sorry I didn’t have those holes in the drive filled up; I’ll do it myself this evening. But here on the avenue,” he said, as they turned north from the gates, “we’ll have this fine cedar-block pavement for quite a good way.”