The rosebud was destined never to bloom for Edward Fane.  His mother was a rich and haughty dame with all the aristocratic prejudices of colonial times.  She scorned Rose Grafton’s humble parentage and caused her son to break his faith, though, had she let him choose, he would have prized his Rosebud above the richest diamond.  The lovers parted, and have seldom met again.  Both may have visited the same mansions, but not at the same time, for one was bidden to the festal hall and the other to the sick-chamber; he was the guest of Pleasure and Prosperity, and she of Anguish.  Rose, after their separation, was long secluded within the dwelling of Mr. Toothaker, whom she married with the revengeful hope of breaking her false lover’s heart.  She went to her bridegroom’s arms with bitterer tears, they say, than young girls ought to shed at the threshold of the bridal-chamber.  Yet, though her husband’s head was getting gray and his heart had been chilled with an autumnal frost, Rose soon began to love him, and wondered at her own conjugal affection.  He was all she had to love; there were no children.

In a year or two poor Mr. Toothaker was visited with a wearisome infirmity which settled in his joints and made him weaker than a child.  He crept forth about his business, and came home at dinner-time and eventide, not with the manly tread that gladdens a wife’s heart, but slowly, feebly, jotting down each dull footstep with a melancholy dub of his staff.  We must pardon his pretty wife if she sometimes blushed to own him.  Her visitors, when they heard him coming, looked for the appearance of some old, old man, but he dragged his nerveless limbs into the parlor—­and there was Mr. Toothaker!  The disease increasing, he never went into the sunshine save with a staff in his right hand and his left on his wife’s shoulder, bearing heavily downward like a dead man’s hand.  Thus, a slender woman still looking maiden-like, she supported his tall, broad-chested frame along the pathway of their little garden, and plucked the roses for her gray-haired husband, and spoke soothingly as to an infant.  His mind was palsied with his body; its utmost energy was peevishness.  In a few months more she helped him up the staircase with a pause at every step, and a longer one upon the landing-place, and a heavy glance behind as he crossed the threshold of his chamber.  He knew, poor man! that the precincts of those four walls would thenceforth be his world—­his world, his home, his tomb, at once a dwelling-and a burial-place—­till he were borne to a darker and a narrower one.  But Rose was with him in the tomb.  He leaned upon her in his daily passage from the bed to the chair by the fireside, and back again from the weary chair to the joyless bed—­his bed and hers, their marriage-bed—­till even this short journey ceased and his head lay all day upon the pillow and hers all night beside it.  How long poor Mr. Toothaker was kept in misery!  Death seemed to draw near the door, and often to lift