Page:Between Two Loves.djvu/227

222 very proud of his connection with him. Persistently now his memory went back to those days. A few times Aske had called him "Father;" he remembered every occasion, and then, with a shuddering pity, recalled the last few imploring words he had heard him speak; his grateful glance for the mouthfuls of cold water; his own eager efforts to bind up the wounded head, the helpless, bleeding weight he had carried through the dim light of that never-to-be-forgotten Christmas-eve.

Early every day he had driven across the common to ask after his son-in-law's condition, and Eleanor had come down to him with a constantly more hopeless face. "He is worse." "He is sinking fast." "He has never recognized me." Only such sad sentences passed between father and daughter. In the parlor in which she usually spoke to him there was a full-length portrait of her, taken in the first happy days of her married life. Jonathan glanced at it one morning, and then at the pale, sorrowful woman standing below it, and he went away with a heart heavy with unavailing regrets.

"Oh, but a wrong way is a hard way! Oh, but a wrong way is a hard way!"