candle in her hand.
The old man rose with an effort as she drew near the bed.

'Put--out--the--candle,' he muttered.

As the night was fast drawing in, Mrs Jenkins hesitated.

'Put--out--the--candle,' repeated the dying man, with a still stronger
effort to rise and extinguish it himself. 'The ruling passion strong in
death' must be attended to, and the light was extinguished.

Rowland Prothero clasped his hands with a groan, and repeated aloud a
prayer from the service for the dying. The terrified wife knelt down by
the bed in the deep gloom, and in the still deeper gloom behind, the son
buried his face in his arms, and leaned upon the little table.

Whilst Rowland Prothero was praying from the very depth of his heart for
the soul that was thus awfully passing to its account, they were all
aroused by the last fearful struggle between death and life of him who
had made gold his god. For some time they feared to rekindle the light,
but at last they ventured. It was but to witness the last dread pangs of
one who had made wife and son secondary to the great absorbing passion
of avarice; and now he was constrained to depart from the scene of his
toil, and to leave all that he had grovelled for behind him, for ever!

We will not dwell upon the awful hours that succeeded his final words.
He neither spoke nor was conscious again. Light and dark were alike to
him. Save that he grasped something in his right hand with an iron hold,
reason and power had left him; death was still fighting with life, and
gradually gaining the last great victory.

A few hours afterwards, and when that victory had been gained, the scene
was changed in that small house. The chamber of death was deserted, and
the wretched clay of the miser, decently covered with a white sheet, lay
heavy and still, where the spirit that formerly animated it had been
accustomed to brood over the miserable gains of its clays and years on
earth.

In the small sitting-room below, behind the little shop where these
gains had been begun and continued for half-a-century or more, sat the
widow, surrounded by a score of gossips, who had left their beds and
homes at daybreak to condole with her.

It would have been much more unnatural than natural if Mrs Jenkins had
grieved at heart for the husband she had lost. Married, or rather sold
to him, when he was fifty and she thirty, she had lived five or six and
twenty years of pure misery with him. She had starved with him, wh