I could brace myself for the big ones. My girls
are as good as girls can be, but who can know a man as his wife knows
him?" Then his memory would conjure up a tuft of brown hair and a
single white, thin hand over a coverlet, and he would feel, as we have
all felt, that if we do not live and know each other after death, then
indeed we are tricked and betrayed by all the highest hopes and subtlest
intuitions of our nature.
The Doctor had his compensations to make up for his loss. The great
scales of Fate had been held on a level for him; for where in all great
London could one find two sweeter girls, more loving, more intelligent,
and more sympathetic than Clara and Ida Walker? So bright were they, so
quick, so interested in all which interested him, that if it were
possible for a man to be compensated for the loss of a good wife then
Balthazar Walker might claim to be so.
Clara was tall and thin and supple, with a graceful, womanly figure.
There was something stately and distinguished in her carriage, "queenly"
her friends called her, while her critics described her as reserved and
distant.
Such as it was, however, it was part and parcel of herself, for she was,
and had always from her childhood been, different from any one around
her.
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