"I am just as helpless as I
ever was."
And then a long and very precious silence. She was filled with many
things too deep for utterance, even had she been free to speak. She
thought of her birthday night a year before, their happiness then, all
that had come to them since, all that love had meant, the great things it
was to do for them. She looked at Karl's face--his fine, strong face
which seemed the very soul of the mellow fire-light. How would that dear
face look when she told him what she had done? Convinced him that great
things were before him now? Would it not be that his determination not to
fail her would stir fires which, even in his most triumphant days, had
slumbered?
But from exultation in all that, she passed to the heart's pain in
leaving him. She moved a little closer, took his hand and rested it
lovingly against her cheek. She had never been away from Karl. Tears came
at the thought of it now.
And he must have been thinking of what Ernestine had meant to him
in the last year, for of a sudden he stooped down and with his old
abandonment, with all the fullness of the first passion and the tender
understanding of these later days, gathered her into his arms.
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