CHAPTER XXI.
No warfare ever can be like that of life fighting against Death who conquers with disease. The silence of this grim battle-field, the tension, the stretching out of some hours into endless repeated seconds, each one accented with new power to pain, the dragging on of other times when the uplifted finger of suspense may point either to life or to the last entrance into the Valley of the Shadow,—who among us but has counted some such drear campaign? Who but has known the wounds given on that field of warfare? Death-scars they may be, not to be healed until they are carried, emblems of the fight, into the presence of the Most High.
It seemed to Loretta in these first days at Mayridge beside her husband's sick-bed that the watch-fires of her very soul were lighted. Not for an instant did her courage fail. Not for an instant did the girl flag in her perpetual hope and watch of him. And her very readiness to take rest from time to time, when possible, showed the fixity of her purpose better than an hysterical endeavor to keep always on her feet, always widely awake. She had to garner strength. Looking at him during the days when he was half in stupor, half lost in wandering, Loretta kept telling herself that some hour of great emergency might come when her whole strength would be needed. The girl's superb physique stood her in good stead: the others looked on in amazement, seeing that her step never faltered, gentle as was its tread in the sickroom, that her arms were strongest to hold Kenyon when he wearied of the pillow and seemed to find unconsciously a comfort in resting his head upon her breast, that her hands were always skilful and firm, yet so softly womanly, and that her voice never showed an accent of impatience or anything that could betray the ache that went on hourly within her heart. A strange feeling possessed Loretta at the time. Kenyon, unconscious of her presence, not knowing whose hand it was he seemed instinctively to seek, not recognizing the voice which they all knew he turned to with a look of relief, not realizing that he rested most tranquilly when her arms were about him,—this Kenyon, Loretta would tell herself, was all her own! Anxiously as she prayed and waited for the crisis to be over, there was the dread of meeting in his eyes something which she must answer, the dread of knowing that the love that she poured forth now in care of him must be locked away, hidden, crushed from sight and if death, as it seemed to be approaching, looked to her like some cruel vengeance, life at times mocked her, or bade her beware of what it might well enough contain.
The days sped or drifted on. The August weather sometimes sent hot rays of sunlight into the room where Kenyon lay, bleached the flowers in the garden, made every blade of grass and every wayside shrub sharply prominent. Sometimes cool evenings followed such a day, and Loretta, with Bella Loring, would steal out into the starlit gardens, and walk up and down, always talking of Kenyon, always wondering what the verdict of heaven was to be. No tension can be like that which comes with such experiences; but the kind of exultant
