'After transacting the business of my trade, all day, I came back earlier than usual at evening, greatly depressed in spirits, but without any idea that I had seen my friend for the last time. As I put my latch-key into the door of the boarding-house, it opened. I saw the pale, frightened face of Martha, the nurse. She was just coming out after me. Miss Brentnall was _dead_.
'THERE was a quiet funeral where I was the only mourner. There were days of loneliness succeeding, in which it seemed to me that the small isthmus by which I had been for a year attached to my fellow-men, had been suddenly covered by the rising of a dark, cold tide; that I was an islander again, and the only one.
'There was a will to be proved in the Surrogate's Court. Miss Brentnall's nurse and the landlady had witnessed it. I thought this strange at first, remembering what a friend the dead had been to me; but my surprise at not being a witness was soon supplanted by the greater one of being sole legatee.
'There was a monument to be placed over the dead. To every detail of it I attended personally. I remember how heavy even that simple little shaft seemed to me, how much too heavy for a head that had borne so much of heaviness through life. Then I thought of her expression 'bird-resurrection,' of her perfect faith in the coming of better things; and if the monument had been a pyramid, I would have known that it could not press _her_ down.
'It is one of my eccentricities that I fear good-fortune; not bad-fortune, at all. For I have seen so much of it, that it only looks to me like a grimmer kind of father, coming to wake his over-slept son and tell him that unless he leaps from his feather-bed, and that right suddenly, the time for every thing good in life will have gone by. I fear good-fortune, because I am not sure that I shall use it well. It may carry me till it has dwarfed me; I may lie on its breast till I have lost my legs; then whisk! it may slip away from under me and leave me a lame beggar for the rest of my life.
'I resolved, therefore, that I would not touch a farthing of my new property until I had become quite familiar with the idea of owning it. It was all in stocks when I found it. I converted it into real-estate securities, and as fast as my interest came in, deposited it in the bank. Meanwhile, I supported myself well upon the little shop; bought books, and laid something by.