"So good-bye! good-bye! good-bye! till I wake up once more after a
long living sleep of many years, I hope; a sleep filled with happy
dreams of you, dear, delightful people, whom I've got to live with
and love, and learn to lose once more; and then--no more good-byes!

"Martia."

* * * * *

So much for Martia--whoever or whatever it was that went by that
name in Barty's consciousness.

After such close companionship for so many years, the loss of
her--or it--was like the loss of a sixth and most valuable sense,
worse almost than the loss of his sight would have been; and with
this he was constantly threatened, for he most unmercifully taxed
his remaining eye, and the field of his vision had narrowed year by
year.

But this impending calamity did not frighten him as in the old days.
His wife was with him now, and as long as she was by his side he
could have borne anything--blindness, poverty, dishonor--anything in
the world. If he lost her, he would survive her loss just long
enough to put his affairs in order, and no more.

But most distressfully he missed the physical feeling of the
north--even in his sleep. This strange bereavement drew him and Leah
even more closely together, if that were possible; and she was well
content to reign alone in the heart of her fractious, unreasonable
but most affectionate, humorous, and irresistible great man.
Although her rival had been but a name and an idea, a mere
abstraction in which she had never really believed, she did not find
it altogether displeasing to herself that the lively Martia was no
more; she has almost told me as much.

And thus began for them both the happiest and most beautiful period
of their joint lives, in spite of sorrows yet to come. She took such
care of him that he might have been as blind as Belisarius himself,
and he seemed almost to depend upon her as much--so wrapt up was he
in the work of his life, so indifferent to all mundane and practical
affairs. What eyesight was not wanted for his pen and pencil he
reserved to look at her with--at his beloved children, and the
things of beauty in and outside Marsfield: pictures, old china,
skies, hills, trees, and river; and what wits remained he kept to
amuse his family and his friends--there was enough and to spare.

The older he grew the more he teemed and seethed and bubbled and
shone--and se