women who filled the house, taking advantage of this opportunity to inspect the furniture with an eye to the auction which would follow the removal of the old people to the city. He hardly heeded the doctor's desperate attempts with all varieties of new-fangled scientific contrivances to stay the hand of death. He hardly knew that his son had come, and in his competent, prosperous way was managing everything for him. He sat in one corner of the sick-room, and agonized over the unconscious sick woman, fighting for every breath.
On the third day he was left alone with her, by some chance, and suddenly the dreadful, heaving gasp was still. He sprang to the bedside, sick with apprehension, but his wife looked up at him with recognition in her eyes. "This is the end, Nathaniel," she said in so low a whisper that he laid his ear to her lips to hear. "Don't let anybody in till I'm gone. I don't want 'em to see how happy I look." Her face wore, indeed, an unearthly look of beatitude.
"Nathaniel," she went on, "I hope there's no life after this—for me anyway. I don't think I ever had very much soul. It was always enough for me to live in the valley with you. When I go back into the ground I'll be where I belong. I ain't fit for heaven, and, anyway, I'm tired. We've lived hard, you and I, Nathaniel; we loved hard when we were young, and we've lived all our lives right out to the end. Now I want to rest."
The old man sat down heavily in a chair by the bed. His lips quivered, but he said nothing. His wife's brief respite from pain had passed as suddenly as it came, and her huge frame began again to shake in the agony of straining breath. She managed to speak between gasps.
