Lotty. Do not you
understand?"

"Yes, Mounchere, yes, I understand,"--sopping his face and bald head
with his handkerchief. "My good men, had you not better go out a moment?
We need air here. He only meant," gently, when they were gone, "that she
is at rest; our pain cannot pain her now."

"When I do suffer, she will suffer with me," muttered Jacobus. "You
don't know," after a pause, "how together we have been, or that you
could not say. Is it that I should go back to that den in New York
_alone_? That I live there for days,--for years? That I hunger and work
as before, and _she_ not heed nor care,--my wife? Ah! you do not know
Lotty!" touching the closed white lids with an inexpressibly tender
smile. "I call her 'Sharley,' when we are alone together,"--going on in
his simple, monotonous fashion; "and when she sleeps the heaviest, she
have never forgot to hear that name. _She never will_,"--looking up
quietly.

"But your wife is dead now," said Lufflin, almost impatiently; "and you
yourself thank God that she will never waken to her old loves and hates
and fancies."

"I?" gasped Jacobus.

There was a long silence; as his old creed came back to him, the blood
rushed thick and cold about his heart.

"God's world, and all His creatures," persisted Lufflin, "are foul with
sin. You blessed Him that for them and it death was an eternal sleep."

"I did not remember her love for me," pleaded Jacobus, humbly. "_It_
could not sleep. Why! you man, Lufflin," starting to his feet, and
drawing up his full height, "if that could be, would I stand to look at
her here? Could I live, if she were truly gone?--she, that has been
strength and hope and hands for me these many years? I'm not a strong
man, like--like you, Captain," with a sudden weak giving way. "God gave
me Sharley. Death cannot take her away."

Lufflin took up her hand.

"So soft it used to be!" he said. "It's been hard-worked since then. It
would be well for Lotty, if death were a long sleep: she needs it."

Jacobus made no reply. He sat down and held his dead in his arms; she
was his own; so were those years of hard work which had worn her hands
rough, and left these sharp lines in her face. He only knew what they
had been: in the long silence that followed, while the daylight
broadened bluer and colder about him, he lived them over again; and he
knew then, by every day of griping poverty, which it wrung the clammy
drops out of his face to remember,--by all he