He dropped into a chair, and hid his face in his hands, while his wife soothed him with loving excuses for what he had done, with tender protests against the exaggerations of his remorse. She said that he had done the only thing he could do; that Lily wished it, and that she never had blamed him. "Why, I don't believe she would ever have married Captain Ehrhardt, anyhow. She was full of that silly fancy of hers about Dick Burton, all the time,--you know how she used always to be talking about him; and when she came home and found she had outgrown him, she had to refuse him, and I suppose it's that that's made her rather melancholy." She explained that Major Burton had become extremely fat, that his moustache was too big and black, and his laugh too loud; there was nothing left of him, in fact, but his empty sleeve, and Lily was too conscientious to marry him merely for that.
In fact, Elmore's regret did reflect a monstrous and distorted image of his conduct. He had really acted the part of a prudent and conscientious man; he was perfectly justifiable at every step: but in the retrospect those steps which we can perfectly justify sometimes seem to have cost so terribly that we look back even upon our sinful stumblings with better heart. Heaven knows how such things will be at the last day; but at that moment there was no wrong, no folly of his youth, of which Elmore did not think with more comfort than of this passage in which he had been so wise and right.
Of course the time came when he saw it all differently again; when his wife persuaded him that he had done the best that any one could do with the responsibilities that ought never to have been laid on a man of his temperament and habits; when he even came to see that Lily's feeling was a matter of pure conjecture with him, and that so far as he knew she had never cared anything for Ehrhardt. Yet he was glad to have her away; he did not like to talk of her with his wife; he did not think of her if he could help it.
They heard from time to time through her sister that her little enterprise in Omaha was prospering, and that she was very contented out West; at last they heard directly from her that she was going to be married. Till then, Elmore had been dumbly tormented in his sombre moods with the solution of a problem at which his imagination vainly toiled,--the problem of how some day she and Ehrhardt should meet again and retrieve the error of the past for him. He contrived this encounter in a thousand different ways by a thousand different chances; what he so passionately and sorrowfully longed for accomplished itself continually in his dreams, but only in his dreams.