tle bed had been; he could hardly find a clear space
there, to throw himself down, on the floor, against the wall, poor
broken man, and let his tears flow as they would. He had shed so many
tears here, long ago, that he was less ashamed of his weakness in this
place than in any other--perhaps, with that consciousness, had made
excuses to himself for coming here. Here, with stooping shoulders, and
his chin dropped on his breast, he had come. Here, thrown upon the bare
boards, in the dead of night, he wept, alone--a proud man, even then;
who, if a kind hand could have been stretched out, or a kind face could
have looked in, would have risen up, and turned away, and gone down to
his cell.

When the day broke he was shut up in his rooms again. He had meant to
go away to-day, but clung to this tie in the house as the last and only
thing left to him. He would go to-morrow. To-morrow came. He would go
to-morrow. Every night, within the knowledge of no human creature, he
came forth, and wandered through the despoiled house like a ghost. Many
a morning when the day broke, his altered face, drooping behind the
closed blind in his window, imperfectly transparent to the light as yet,
pondered on the loss of his two children. It was one child no more. He
reunited them in his thoughts, and they were never asunder. Oh, that he
could have united them in his past love, and in death, and that one had
not been so much worse than dead!

Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even
before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen
natures; for they struggle hard to be such. Ground, long undermined,
will often fall down in a moment; what was undermined here in so many
ways, weakened, and crumbled, little by little, more and more, as the
hand moved on the dial.

At last he began to think he need not go at all. He might yet give up
what his creditors had spared him (that they had not spared him more,
was his own act), and only sever the tie between him and the ruined
house, by severing that other link--

It was then that his footfall was audible in the late housekeeper's
room, as he walked to and fro; but not audible in its true meaning, or
it would have had an appalling sound.

The world was very busy and restless about him. He became aware of that
again. It was whispering and babbling. It was never quiet. This, and
the intricacy and complication of the footsteps, harassed him to death.
Objects bega