'Come,' said the doctor, pausing with his hand upon the door, and turning to me, 'cheer up! There is no misery, after all, but what is in the comparative degree. Things are never so bad but that they may have been worse. I dare say, on occasion you can be a brave little woman.'
'I can,' I returned, eagerly, too grateful for his penetration, or at least his good opinion, and too sad and abstracted altogether, to notice that he was paying me a compliment. 'I can, indeed; indeed, you haven't seen the best part of me.'
He smiled just the ghost of a smile in answer, as we went in. He led me through several rooms into what had been a large dining hall--a chill, bare, desolate place. Cots were ranged up and down the room, cots across it, cots filled up the centre, and all, _all_ filled with sick and wounded men. I thought if I was once in the room with my brother, some instinct would lead me to him; but I felt no drawing toward any one of those miserable bedsides, and a chill of disappointment fell upon me. 'Take me to the ward where my brother is lying,' I said to the doctor, pleadingly, 'ah, pray do!' 'This _is_ the ward,' he replied, but he did not take me to him. He stopped at every cot we passed. Of my burning impatience, which he could not choose but see, of the urgent and almost passionate appeals I made to hasten his progress, he took no notice whatever. He stopped almost every moment; he felt the pulse of one patient, questioned another, dealt out medicine here and there--took his own time for everything. We stopped at last where, on the outside of the coverlet, lay a wounded soldier, half dressed; a poor, mutilated creature; a leg and an arm were gone. The face was turned toward the wall, away from us; not a muscle moved; he was sleeping, probably. 'Take me to my brother,' I piteously moaned, shuddering with horror as I turned from the unaccustomed sight. 'I have waited so long; do take me to my brother.' 'This is somebody's brother!' said the doctor, sharply. Something in the tone, not the sharpness of it--something half familiar in the broken outline of the form, caused a half-suffocating sense of a vague, unutterable horror. A deathly faintness seized me; I sank into a chair beside the bed. The doctor gave me water to drink--hastily and silently sprinkled some water upon my head and face. There was a movement of the poor maimed form upon the bed--he gave me a warning look--the face turned toward us. It was my darling's! 'My life!' Shivering and shuddering I threw myself upon the narrow bed beside him, clasped my poor darling in my arms, and held his stricken heart to mine. The hard, defiant look upon his features melted into one of tenderness--down the worn face the tears fell slowly. 'I didn't know as you would love me just the same,' he said. It was his right arm that was gone. Calling him by every endearing name with wild expressions of affection, I wiped the tears tenderly away, covering the dear face with kisses, while my own fell fast. The doctor left us together for a little--albeit used to scenes like this, wiping _his_ eyes as he went away.