Presently the old man sighed deeply,--so you would have thought; but
Mrs. Talbot, hurrying to him, knew that he had tried to say "Jane," and
had said it for the last time.

Yes, he had been getting sleepier and sleepier; all his life he had been
trying to sleep, and at last he slept.

To most people Mr. Talbot's death was the first intimation of his ever
having lived, and one rather resents for the old man the one day's
publicity which death enforced upon him. It was indeed well for him that
he was dead, for such unwonted excitement would surely have killed him.
This important coming and going of undertakers; this populous invasion
of friends talking like muffled drums in the front parlour, and passing
up and down and up and down the stairs, in and out and in and out of his
still room; this throng of neighbours awaiting him in the streets; these
plumed impatient horses, and these carriages of dark grandeur--"Jane,
why ever didn't you bury me by the back door?" would surely have been
the old man's pitiful complaint could he have known.

However, the day passed and the old man was safe at last, where no
front-parlour visitors should affright him more, and where no one would
trouble his old brains for speech any more; and to all, save one, his
death was but as though he had moved a little farther into the kitchen.

It seemed almost strange that even his wife should miss him. One had
thought so little of them as man and wife. One could hardly, even by
process of thinking, realise that between these rinded and wrinkled
beings love had once hung like a rosy cloud, from which one day had
sprung Jenny.