THE FIRST DAY OF RICHARD’S ABSENCE

The gray light of a November morning was breaking over the prairies when Richard stooped down to kiss his wife, who did not think it worth her while to rise so early even to see him off.  She felt that she had been unjustly dealt with, and up to the very last maintained the same cold, icy manner so painful to Richard, who would fain have won from her one smile to cheer him in his absence.  But the smile was not given, though the lips which Richard touched did move a little, and he tried to believe it was a kiss they meant to give.  Only the day before Ethie had heard from Aunt Van Buren that Frank was to be married at Christmas, when they would all go on to Washington, where they confidently expected to meet Ethelyn.  With a kind of grim satisfaction Ethelyn showed this to her husband, hoping to awaken in him some remorse for his cruelty to her, if, indeed, he was capable of remorse, which she doubted.  She did not know him, for if possible he suffered more than she did, though in a different way.  It hurt him to leave her there alone feeling as she did.  He hated to go without her, carrying only in his mind the memory of the white, rigid face which had not smiled on him for so long.  He wanted her to seem interested in something, for her cold apathy of manner puzzled and alarmed him; so remembering her aunt’s letter on the morning of his departure, he spoke of it to her and said, “What shall I tell Mrs. Van Buren for you?  I shall probably see more or less of them.”

“Tell nothing; prisoners send no messages,” was Ethelyn’s reply; and in the dim gray of the morning the two faces looked a moment at each other with such thoughts and passions written upon them as were pitiable to behold.

But when Richard was fairly gone, when the tones of his voice bidding his family good-by had ceased, and Ethelyn sat leaning on her elbow and listening to the sound of the wheels which carried him away, such a feeling of utter desolation and loneliness swept over her that, burying her face in the pillows, she wept bitterer tears of remorse and regret than she had ever wept before.

That day was a long and dreary one to all the members of the prairie farmhouse.  It was lonely there the first day of Richard’s absence, but now it was drearier than ever; and with a harsh, forbidding look upon her face, Mrs. Markham went about her work, leaving Ethelyn entirely alone.  She did not believe her daughter-in-law was any sicker than herself.  “It was only airs,” she thought, when at noon Ethelyn declined the boiled beef and cabbage, saying just the odor of it made her sick.  “Nothing but airs and ugliness,” she persisted in saying to herself, as she prepared a slice of nice cream toast with a soft-boiled egg and cup of fragrant black tea.  Ethie did not refuse this, and was even gracious enough to thank her mother-in-law for her extra trouble, but she did it in such a queenly as well as injured