d hurried on. Trina tore off the wrappings.

It was the framed photograph of McTeague and his wife in their wedding
finery, the one that had been taken immediately after the marriage.
It represented Trina sitting very erect in a rep armchair, holding her
wedding bouquet straight before her, McTeague standing at her side, his
left foot forward, one hand upon her shoulder, and the other thrust into
the breast of his "Prince Albert" coat, in the attitude of a statue of a
Secretary of State.

"Oh, it WAS good of him, it WAS good of him," cried Trina, her eyes
filling again. "I had forgotten to put it away. Of course it was not for
sale."

They went on down the stairs, and arriving at the door of the
sitting-room, opened it and looked in. It was late in the afternoon,
and there was just light enough for the dentist and his wife to see the
results of that day of sale. Nothing was left, not even the carpet.
It was a pillage, a devastation, the barrenness of a field after the
passage of a swarm of locusts. The room had been picked and stripped
till only the bare walls and floor remained. Here where they had been
married, where the wedding supper had taken place, where Trina had bade
farewell to her father and mother, here where she had spent those first
few hard months of her married life, where afterward she had grown to
be happy and contented, where she had passed the long hours of the
afternoon at her work of whittling, and where she and her husband had
spent so many evenings looking out of the window before the lamp was
lit--here in what had been her home, nothing was left but echoes and the
emptiness of complete desolation. Only one thing remained. On the wall
between the windows, in its oval glass frame, preserved by some unknown
and fearful process, a melancholy relic of a vanished happiness, unsold,
neglected, and forgotten, a thing that nobody wanted, hung Trina's
wedding bouquet.

CHAPTER 15

Then the grind began. It would have been easier for the McTeagues to
have faced their misfortunes had they befallen them immediately after
their marriage, when their love for each other was fresh and fine, and
when they could have found a certain happiness in helping each other and
sharing each other's privations. Trina, no doubt, loved her husband
more than ever, in the sense that she felt she belonged to him. But
McTeague's affection for his wife was dwindling a little every day--HAD
been dwindling for a long time,