every
step, and a longer one upon the landing-place, and a heavy glance
behind as he crossed the threshold of his chamber. He knew, poor man!
that the precincts of those four walls would thenceforth be his
world--his world, his home, his tomb, at once a dwelling-and a
burial-place--till he were borne to a darker and a narrower one. But
Rose was with him in the tomb. He leaned upon her in his daily passage
from the bed to the chair by the fireside, and back again from the
weary chair to the joyless bed--his bed and hers, their
marriage-bed--till even this short journey ceased and his head lay all
day upon the pillow and hers all night beside it. How long poor Mr.
Toothaker was kept in misery! Death seemed to draw near the door, and
often to lift the latch, and sometimes to thrust his ugly skull into
the chamber, nodding to Rose and pointing at her husband, but still
delayed to enter. "This bedridden wretch cannot escape me," quoth
Death. "I will go forth and run a race with the swift and fight a
battle with the strong, and come back for Toothaker at my leisure."
Oh, when the deliverer came so near, in the dull anguish of her
worn-out sympathies did she never long to cry, "Death, come in"?

But no; we have no right to ascribe such a wish to our friend Rose.
She never failed in a wife's duty to her poor sick husband. She
murmured not though a glimpse of the sunny sky was as strange to her
as him, nor answered peevishly though his complaining accents roused
her from sweetest dream only to share his wretchedness. He knew her
faith, yet nourished a cankered jealousy; and when the slow disease
had chilled all his heart save one lukewarm spot which Death's frozen
fingers were searching for, his last words were, "What would my Rose
have done for her first love, if she has been so true and kind to a
sick old man like me?" And then his poor soul crept away and left the
body lifeless, though hardly more so than for years before, and Rose a
widow, though in truth it was the wedding-night that widowed her. She
felt glad, it must be owned, when Mr. Toothaker was buried, because
his corpse had retained such a likeness to the man half alive that she
hearkened for the sad murmur of his voice bidding her shift his
pillow. But all through the next winter, though the grave had held him
many a month, she fancied him calling from that cold bed, "Rose, Rose!
Come put a blanket on my feet!"

So now the Rosebud was the widow Toothaker. Her tro