She read it over and over again and cried as though her heart would break as a thousand tender memories came stealing back from their early married life.
"Oh, dear God!" she sobbed. "How could he have felt that—and he did feel it—and now desert me!"
She sat for an hour with this framed emblem of her happiness and her sorrow in her hands, dreaming of their past.
She was a girl again in old Hampton, Virginia, her heart all a-quiver over a ball at the Hygeia, where she was to meet a guest, a distinguished young preacher resting for the summer just from his divinity course. He had seen her in the crowd at the hotel and begged a friend to introduce him. She was going to meet him in the parlours, dressed in the splendour of her ballroom dress that night, and conquer this handsome young giant. And from the moment they met, she was the conquered, and he the conqueror.
The incense of their honeymoon in a village of southern Indiana during his first pastorate, when the wonder of love made storm days bright with splendour and clothed in beauty the meanest clod of earth, stole over her soul—each memory added to her pain, and yet they were sweet. She hugged them to her heart.
"They are all mine at least!" she sighed. "And I am glad I have lived them."
