and had
left him to the grudging care of an uncle with a large enough family.

And now his own family was obliterated. He was again a single man, that
familiar thing called a widower. He could not accept it as a fact. He
denied his eyes. He was as incredulous as a man who sees a magician play
some old vanishing trick. He had seen it, but he could not understand it
enough to believe it. When the hack left him at his house he found it
emptier than he could have imagined a house could be. Marthy was not on
the porch, or in the settin'-room, the dinin'-room, the kitchen, or
anywhere up-stairs. The bed was empty, the stove cold. The lamp had not
been filled. The cruse of his life was dry, the silver cord loosened,
the pitcher broken at the fountain, the wheel broken at the cistern.

As he stumbled about filling the lamp, and covering his hands with
kerosene, he wondered what he should do in those long hours between the
closing of the shoe-shop of evenings and its opening of mornings. Men
behave differently in this recurring situation. Some take to drink, or
return to it. Rudd did not like liquor; at least he did not think he
would have liked it if he had ever tasted it. Some take to gambling.
Rudd did not know big casino from little, though he had once almost
acquired a passion for checkers--the give-away game. Some submerge
themselves in money-getting. Rudd would not have given up the serene
certainty of his little salary for a speculator's chance to clean up a
million, or lose his margin.

If only the child had lived, he should have had an industry, an
ambition, a use.

Widowers have occasionally hunted consolation with the same sex that
sent them grief. Rudd had never known any woman in town as well as he
had known Martha, and it had taken him years to find courage to propose
to her. The thought of approaching any other woman with intimate
intention gave him an ague sweat.

And how was he to think of taking another wife? Even if he had not been
so confounded with grief for his helpmeet as to believe her the only
woman on earth for him, how could he have accosted another woman when he
had only debts for a dowry?

Death is an expensive thing in every phase. The event that robbed Rudd
of his wife, his child, his hope, had taken also his companion, his
cook, his chambermaid, his washerwoman, the mender of his things; and in
their place had left an appalling monument of bills. The only people he
had permitted himself to