here was one less mouth to
feed; and with this saving, together with the little she could earn as
scrub-woman, Trina could almost manage to make good the amount she lost
by being obliged to cease work upon the Noah's ark animals.

Little by little her sorrow over the loss of her precious savings
overcame the grief of McTeague's desertion of her. Her avarice had grown
to be her one dominant passion; her love of money for the money's
sake brooded in her heart, driving out by degrees every other natural
affection. She grew thin and meagre; her flesh clove tight to her small
skeleton; her small pale mouth and little uplifted chin grew to have a
certain feline eagerness of expression; her long, narrow eyes glistened
continually, as if they caught and held the glint of metal. One day as
she sat in her room, the empty brass match-box and the limp chamois bag
in her hands, she suddenly exclaimed:

"I could have forgiven him if he had only gone away and left me my
money. I could have--yes, I could have forgiven him even THIS"--she
looked at the stumps of her fingers. "But now," her teeth closed
tight and her eyes flashed,

"now--I'll--never--forgive--him--as-long--as--I--live."

The empty bag and the hollow, light match-box troubled her. Day after
day she took them from her trunk and wept over them as other women weep
over a dead baby's shoe. Her four hundred dollars were gone, were gone,
were gone. She would never see them again. She could plainly see her
husband spending her savings by handfuls; squandering her beautiful gold
pieces that she had been at such pains to polish with soap and ashes.
The thought filled her with an unspeakable anguish. She would wake at
night from a dream of McTeague revelling down her money, and ask of the
darkness, "How much did he spend to-day? How many of the gold pieces are
left? Has he broken either of the two twenty-dollar pieces yet? What did
he spend it for?"

The instant she was out of the hospital Trina had begun to save again,
but now it was with an eagerness that amounted at times to a veritable
frenzy. She even denied herself lights and fuel in order to put by a
quarter or so, grudging every penny she was obliged to spend. She did
her own washing and cooking. Finally she sold her wedding dress, that
had hitherto lain in the bottom of her trunk.

The day she moved from Zerkow's old house, she came suddenly upon the
dentist's concertina under a heap of old clothes in the closet. Wit