ive them a dinner or a ball, or pay them
some such social tribute, and there were a myriad calls to be received
and returned; but they found time for retired communings, even for long
drives in the sleigh which, many a time in young Jacob Dolph's bachelor
days, had borne the young man and a female companion--not always the
same companion, either--up the Bloomingdale Road. And in the confidences
of those early days young Jacob learned what his gentle little wife told
him--without herself realizing the pathos of it--the story of her
crushed, unchildlike youth, loveless till he came, her prince, her
deliverer. Dolph understood it; he had known, of course, that she could
not have been happy under the _regime_ of Madam Des Anges; but when he
heard the simple tale in all its monotonous detail, and saw spread out
before him this poor young life, with its thousand little
disappointments, submissions, abnegations, and undeserved punishments
and needless restrictions, a generous rage glowed in his heart, and
perhaps sprang once in a while to his indiscreet lips; and out of this
grew a deeper and maturer tenderness than his honeymoon love for the
sweet little soul that he had at first sought only for the dark eyes
through which it looked out upon its joyless world.

It is unwise to speak in profane language, it is injudicious to speak
disrespectfully of old age, yet the Recording Angel, if he did not see
fit to let a tear fall upon the page, perchance found it convenient to
be mending his pen when young Jacob Dolph once uttered certain words
that made his wife cry out:

"Oh, Jacob, don't, _please_ don't. She didn't mean it!"

This is only a supposition. Perhaps Madam Des Anges really had meant
well. But oh, how much happier this world would be if all the people who
"mean well" and do ill would only take to meaning ill and doing well!

* * * * *

Jacob Dolph the elder took but a doubtful part in all the festivities.
The cloud that had hung dimly over him had begun to show little rifts;
but the dark masses between the rifts were thicker and heavier than
ever. It was the last brief convulsive struggle of the patient against
the power of the anaesthetic, when the nervous hand goes up to put the
cloth away from the mouth, just before the work is done and
consciousness slips utterly away, and life is no more for the sufferer,
though his heart beat and the breath be warm between his lips.

[Illustrati