CONCLUSION.
The neighbors dropped their milk-cans and flocked to the stricken home. A bundle and a walking-stick had been reverently carried to an upper room and placed upon a desk. These relics of despair's weary journey had been picked up from the ground, beneath the old man's window. He had stood there at night, alone, when the household was asleep. And now, when all were awake, he lay asleep, beflowered, roses on his breast, a broken heart perfumed.
"He looks natural," said a man who had laughed at him.
"But he doesn't seem to be tickling any one now," Milford was bitter enough to reply.
The soft earth beneath the window, the window once of fair prospect, was many-tracked by the feet of indecisive agony, as if the old man had shambled there, debating with his despair. But that he had made up his mind early in the evening was now clear to Milford. Perhaps the sight of the window through which he had looked out upon the leafless tree, the hope that he had seen hanging from its branches—perhaps his nearness to the sleeping household had caused him for a brief time to waver, but not for long. Milford recalled his classification of the poets, "Wordsworth, the lake." And his cry out in the dark, "Wordsworth! Wordsworth!" His fishing-rod argued that he strove to hide the appearance of self-destruction, but in the iced water he forgot his last thin pretense of caution, shouting as the excited spectator believed, "Warmer than the world!"
The awful agony of the first clod, falling with hollow sound, the tearing rush of memory, the gasp of the heart, missing a beat! The widow fell senseless at the grave, and they took her away, the daughter sobbing over her. Yes, they all took him seriously now.
"It does seem that he could have done something," said Steve Hardy, waiting for Milford outside the graveyard.
"He did," Milford replied.
"I mean—you know what I mean. I don't see how a man can give up that way. Seems to me like I'd fight till the last."
"Yes, but that man was more of a hero than you could ever be. He saw that he could not keep up his insurance, and he decided that it was better to die."