."

Martin closed his eyes wearily and gave a deep sigh. To his wife's
quickened ears, it was charged with lingering regret for frustrated
plans and palpitant with his consciousness of life's evanescence and of
the futility of his own success.

She waited patiently for him to continue his instructions, but the
opiates had begun to take effect and Martin lapsed into sleep.
Although he lived until the next morning, he never again regained full
consciousness.

XI. THE DUST SETTLES

ROSE'S grief was a surprise to herself; there was no blinking the fact
that her life was going to be far more disrupted by Martin's death than
it had been by Bill's. There were other differences. Where that loss
had struck her numb, this quickened every sensibility, drove her into
action; more than that, as she realized how much less there was to
regret in the boy's life than in his father's, how much more he had got
out of his few short years, the edge of the older, more precious sorrow,
dulled. During quite long periods she would be so absorbed in her
thoughts of Martin that Bill would not enter her mind. Was it possible,
that this husband who with his own lips had confessed he had never
loved her, had been a more integral part of herself than the son who had
adored her? What was this bond that had roots deeper than love? Was it
merely because they had grown so used to each other that she felt as
if half of her had been torn away and buried, leaving her crippled and
helpless? Probably it would have been different if Bill had been living.
Was it because when he had died, she still had had Martin, demanding,
vital, to goad her on and give the semblance of a point to her life,
and now she was left alone, adrift? She pondered over these questions,
broodingly.

"I suppose you'll want to sell out, Rose," Nellie's husband, Bert Mall,
big and cordial as Peter had been before him, suggested a day or two
after the funeral. "I'll try to get you a buyer, or would you rather
rent?"

"I haven't any plans yet, Bert," Mrs. Wade had evaded adroitly, "it's
all happened so quickly. I have plenty of time and there are lots
of things to be seen to." There had been that in her voice which had
forbidden discussion, and it was a tone to which she was forced to have
recourse more than once during the following days when it seemed to her
that all her friends were in a conspiracy to persuade her to a hasty,
ill-advised upheaval.

Nothing, she resolved, s