"
"Poor Adam! I ask myself if I have not sometimes pained him," she
said.
"You have made him very happy," said Thaddeus; "you ought to be easy
on that score, for you have shown every indulgence for him."
"My loss would be irreparable."
"But, dear, you judged him justly."
"I was never blind to his faults," she said, "but I loved him as a
wife should love her husband."
"Then you ought, in case you lose him," said Thaddeus, in a voice
which Clementine had never heard him use, "to grieve for him less than
if you lost a man who was your pride, your love, and all your life,--
as some men are to you women. Surely you can be frank at this moment
with a friend like me. I shall grieve, too; long before your marriage
I had made him my child, I had sacrificed my life to him. If he dies I
shall be without an interest on earth; but life is still beautiful to
a widow of twenty-four."
"Ah! but you know that I love no one," she said, with the impatience
of grief.
"You don't yet know what it is to love," said Thaddeus.
"Oh, as husbands are, I have sense enough to prefer a child like my
poor Adam to a superior man. It is now over a month that we have been
saying to each other, 'Will he live?' and these alternations have
prepared me, as they have you, for this loss. I can be frank with you.
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