is wife's
memory, and apparently never imagined such a thing as marrying again.

He rose from the chair where he had sat looking up into her pictured
face, and went to open the safe near the window. But he stopped in
stooping over to work the combination, and glanced out across his
shoulder into the night. The familiar beauty of the scene tempted him to
the window for what, all at once, he felt might be his last look, though
the next instant he was able to argue the feeling down, and make his
meditated act work into his schemes of early retrieval and honorable
return. He must have been thinking there before the fire a long time,
for now the moon had risen, and shone upon the black bulk of firs to the
southward, and on the group of outbuildings. These were in a sort the
mechanism that transacted the life of his house, ministering to all its
necessities and pleasures. Under the conservatories, with their long
stretches of glass, catching the moon's rays like levels of water, was
the steam furnace that imparted their summer climate, through heavy
mains carried below the basement, to every chamber of the mansion; a
ragged plume of vapor escaped from the tall chimney above them, and
dishevelled itself in diaphanous silver on the night-breeze. Beyond the
hot-houses lay the cold graperies; and off to the left rose the stables;
in a cosy nook of this low mass Northwick saw the lights of the
coachman's family-rooms; beyond the stables were the cow-barn and the
dairy, with the farmer's cottage; it was a sort of joke with Northwick's
business friends that you could buy butter of him sometimes at less than
half it cost him, and the joke flattered Northwick's sense of baronial
consequence with regard to his place. It was really a farm in extent,
and it was mostly a grazing farm; his cattle were in the herd-books, and
he raised horses, which he would sell now and then to a friend; they
were so distinctly varied from the original stock as to form almost a
breed of themselves; they numbered scores in his stalls and pastures.
The whole group of the buildings was so great that it was like a sort of
communal village. In the silent moonlight Northwick looked at it as if
it were an expansion or extension of himself, so personally did it seem
to represent his tastes, and so historical was it of the ambitions of
his whole life; he realized that it would be like literally tearing
himself from it, when he should leave it. That would be the real