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Updated: June 22, 2025
Ewbert broke down in her turn. "I don't know what I'm saying!" she retorted from behind her handkerchief. "I'm trying to show you that it's your duty to yourself and to me and to people who can know how to profit by your teaching and your example, not to give way as you're doing, simply because a wornout old agnostic couldn't keep his hold on the truth.
"Yes, what?" Mrs. Ewbert followed him up. "So far as I could make out, Mr. Hilbrook's life hadn't filled up with other interests. He did not care for the events of the day, as far as I tried him on them, and he did not care for the past. I tempted him with autobiography; but he seemed quite indifferent to his own history, though he was not reticent about it.
In this bleak air it seemed to him that he at last detected the one thing in which the old man felt an interest: his sole tie with the earth was the belief that when he left it he should cease to be. This affected Ewbert as most interesting, and he set himself, with all his heart and soul, to dislodge Hilbrook from his deplorable conviction.
As he knew she wished, her husband represented that Hilbrook's having come the last Sunday night was no proof that he was going to make a habit of it. "But he stayed so late!" she insisted from the safety of her real belief that he was not coming. "He came very early, though," said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion.
It lasted me four or five years, in all, I guess; but I was married to somebody else when I went to the war," Ewbert controlled a start of surprise; he had always taken it for granted that Hilbrook was a bachelor, "and we had one child. So you may say that I was well over that first thing.
Ewbert left them to finish up the work she had promised herself not to leave for the maid. It was much that Hilbrook had come at all, and he ought to be made to realize that Ewbert appreciated his coming.
Her long-pent-up impatience broke in tears, and he strove in vain to comfort her with caresses. "Oh, what a fatal day it was when you stirred that wretched old creature up! Why couldn't you leave him alone!" "To his apathy? To his despair? Emily!" Ewbert dropped his arms from the embrace in which he had folded her woodenly unresponsive frame, and regarded her sadly.
"Yes, I'm hungry," the old man assented, "but I don't want to eat anything." Ewbert had risen hopefully in making his suggestion, but now his heart sank. Here, it seemed to him, a physician rather than a philosopher was needed, and at the sound of wheels on the wagon track to the door his imagination leaped to the miracle of the doctor's providential advent.
Ewbert went out to the gate with the old man, and when he came back to his study, he found his wife there looking strangely tall and monumental in her reproach. "I supposed you were in bed long ago, my dear," he attempted lightly. "You don't mean that you've been out in the night air without your hat on!" she returned. "Well, this is too much!"
Ewbert dreaded to look in the direction of Hilbrook's pew, lest he should find it empty; but the old man was there, and he sat blinking at the minister, as his custom was, through the sermon, and thoughtfully passing the tip of his tongue over the inner edge of his lower lip.
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