We will not dwell upon the awful hours that succeeded his final words.  He neither spoke nor was conscious again.  Light and dark were alike to him.  Save that he grasped something in his right hand with an iron hold, reason and power had left him; death was still fighting with life, and gradually gaining the last great victory.

A few hours afterwards, and when that victory had been gained, the scene was changed in that small house.  The chamber of death was deserted, and the wretched clay of the miser, decently covered with a white sheet, lay heavy and still, where the spirit that formerly animated it had been accustomed to brood over the miserable gains of its clays and years on earth.

In the small sitting-room below, behind the little shop where these gains had been begun and continued for half-a-century or more, sat the widow, surrounded by a score of gossips, who had left their beds and homes at daybreak to condole with her.

It would have been much more unnatural than natural if Mrs Jenkins had grieved at heart for the husband she had lost.  Married, or rather sold to him, when he was fifty and she thirty, she had lived five or six and twenty years of pure misery with him.  She had starved with him, when she could not pilfer from him, and had endured patiently all these years what seemed past endurance in expectation of the closing scene.  She had married and lived upon the prospect of his death, and it was come at last; and now that it was come, the awfulness of that last struggle overpowered her, and she wept and lamented as copiously as if her husband had been the kindest and most liberal in the world.  Still, she was free, with competence, she hoped, in perspective? and this thought, together with the ever all-pervading one of her idol, her treasure, her only son, and his expectations, more than counterbalanced that of the death she had witnessed.

‘Come you, don’t you be takking on so,’ said one old woman soothingly, as the widow rocked herself to and fro, and held her handkerchief to her eyes.

‘Tak’ you this drop o’ tea,’ said another, ‘it’ll be doing you good,’

‘The Lord will be having mercy on his soul,’ said a third, whose conscience was large when she was offering comfort.

‘There now, keep up your spirits, Mrs Jinkins, fach,’ said a fourth, entering with a comfortable glass of gin and water that did seem of an exhilarating nature.

‘There’s a comfort Howel will be to you now!’ said a fifth triumphantly.

’Deed to goodness, Griffey Jinkins was a saving man, and you have lost him, Mrs Jinkins, fach,’ began the friend with the gin and water; ’but I am seeing no use in takking on so.  When John Jones died, he was leaving me with ten children, and they have all come on somehow.  And you have only wan son, and he is so ginteel!  Drink you this, my dear, and don’t be down-hearted.’

Mrs Jenkins turned from the tea to the gin and water with no apparent reluctance, and swallowed a portion of it.  Revived by the beverage, she responded to the condolences of her friends by more rockings, sobs, and applications of the handkerchief and finally unburdened herself of her grief in the following manner.