his studio, and resuming
his old familiar labors, which had been suspended from the time when her
illness had originally declared itself.

On the first day when, in obedience to her wishes, he sat before
his picture again--the half-finished picture from which he had been
separated for so many months--on that first day, when the friendly
occupation of his life seemed suddenly to have grown strange to him;
when his brush wandered idly among the colors, when his tears dropped
fast on the palette every time he looked down on it; when he tried
hard to work as usual, though only for half an hour, only on simple
background places in the composition; and still the brush made false
touches, and still the tints would not mingle as they should, and still
the same words, repeated over and over again, would burst from his lips:
"Oh, poor Lavvie! oh, poor, dear, dear Lavvie!"--even then, the spirit
of that beloved art, which he had always followed so humbly and so
faithfully, was true to its divine mission, and comforted and upheld him
at the last bitterest moment when he laid down his palette in despair.

While he was still hiding his face before the very picture which he and
his wife had once innocently and secretly glorified together, in those
happy days of its beginning that were never to come again, the sudden
thought of consolation shone out on his heart, and showed him how he
might adorn all his afterlife with the deathless beauty of a pure and
noble purpose. Thenceforth, his vague dreams of fame, and of rich men
wrangling with each other for the possession of his pictures, took
the second place in his mind; and, in their stead, sprang up the new
resolution that he would win independently, with his own brush, no
matter at what sacrifice of pride and ambition, the means of surrounding
his sick wife with all those luxuries and refinements which his own
little income did not enable him to obtain, and which he shrank with
instinctive delicacy from accepting as presents bestowed by his father's
generosity. Here was the consoling purpose which robbed affliction of
half its bitterness already, and bound him and his art together by a
bond more sacred than any that had united them before. In the very hour
when this thought came to him, he rose without a pang to turn the great
historical composition, from which he had once hoped so much, with
its face to the wall, and set himself to finish an unpretending little
"Study" of a cottage co