Dare and Antonia, and even the doctor,
watched their almost childlike devotion to each other with
sympathetic delight.
Oh, if such moments could only last! No, no; as a rule they
last long enough. Joy wearies as well as sorrow. An
abiding rapture would make itself a sorrow out of our very
weakness to bear it. We should become exhausted and exacting,
and be irritated by the limitations of our nature, and our
inability to create and to endure an increasing rapture. It
is because joy is fugitive that it leaves us a delightsome
memory. It is far better, then, not to hold the rose until it
withers in our fevered hand.
The three women watched their heroes go back to the city. The
doctor looked very little older than his companions. He sat
his horse superbly, and he lifted his hat to the proud Senora
with a loving grace which neither of the young men could
excel. In that far back year, when he had wooed her with the
sweet words she taught him, he had not looked more manly and
attractive. There is a perverse disposition in women to love
personal prowess, and to adore the heroes of the battle-field;
and never had the Senora loved her husband as she did at that
hour.
In his capacity of physician he had done unnoticed deeds of
far greater bravery--gone into a Comanche camp that was being
devastated by smallpox--or galloped fifty miles; alone in
the night, through woods haunted by savage men and beasts, to
succor some little child struggling with croup, or some
frontiersman pierced with an arrow.
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