At the word "veiled," Dexter shuddered. "Very pretty," he said, with a forced laugh which sounded flat. "Why don't you put it into a sermon?"
Thorpe's face became troubled. "My sermons do not please," he answered, with touching simplicity. "They say there is not enough of hell."
"I'm satisfied," commented the Doctor, in a grating voice. "I think there's plenty of hell."
"You never come to church," remarked the minister, not seeing the point.
"There's hell enough outside--for any reasonable mortal," returned Dexter. He was keyed to a high pitch. He felt that, at any instant, something might snap and leave him inert.
Thorpe sighed. His wrinkled old hand strayed out across the papers and turned the face of Ralph's mother toward him. He studied it closely, not having seen it before. Then he looked up at the Doctor, whose face was again like a mask.
"Your--?" A lift of the eyebrows finished the question.
Dexter nodded, with assumed carelessness. There was another long pause.
"Sometimes I envy you," said Thorpe, laying the picture down carefully, "you have had so much of life and joy. I think it is better for you to have had her and lost her than not to have had her at all," he continued, unconsciously paraphrasing. "Even in your loneliness, you have the comfort of memory, and your boy--I have wondered what a son might mean to me, now, in my old age. Dead though she is, you know she still loves you; that somewhere she is waiting to take your hand in hers."
"Don't!" cried Dexter. The strain was well-nigh insupportable.
"Forgive me, my friend," returned Thorpe, quickly. "I--" Then he paused. "As I was saying," he went on, after a little, "I have often envied you."
"Don't," said Dexter, again. "As you were also saying, distance hides the peak and you do not see the scars."
Thorpe's eyes sought the picture of Dexter's wife with an evident tenderness, mingled with yearning. "I often think," he sighed, "that in Heaven we may have a chance to pay our debt to woman. Through woman's agony we come into the world, by woman's care we are nourished, by woman's wisdom we are taught, by woman's love we are sheltered, and, at the last, it is a woman who closes our eyes. At every crisis of a man's life, a woman is always waiting, to help him if she may, and I have seen that at any crisis in a woman's life, we are apt to draw back and shirk. She helps us bear our difficulties; she faces hers alone."
Dexter turned uneasily in his chair. His face was inscrutable. The silent moment cried out for speech--for anything to relieve the tension. Through Ralph's letters Evelina's eyes seemed to be upon him, beseeching him to speak.