Summer passed, and autumn, and winter drew on—­filling the dwellers in Fordham cottage with fear of they knew not what miseries.  There had been ups and downs; there had been happiness and woe; there had been times of strength and times of weakness—­of weakness when The Dreamer, unable to hold out in the desperate battle of life as he knew it; hungry, cold and heartbroken at the sight of his wife with that faraway look in her eyes, had fallen—­had sought and found forgetfulness only to know a horrible awakening that was despair and that was oftentimes accompanied by illness.  Now, there was added to every thing else the knowledge that she—­his wife—­his heartsease flower, and the Mother, in spite of all his striving for them, were objects of charity.

When some of his friends, in the kindness of their hearts, published in one of the papers an appeal to the admirers of Edgar Poe’s work for aid for him and his family in their distress, he came out in a proud denial of their need for aid.  The need was great enough, God knows!—­but the pitiful exposure was more painful than the pangs of cold and hunger.

* * * * *

At last the day drew near of whose approach all who had visited the cottage knew but of which they had schooled themselves not to think.

January 1847 was waning.  For many days the ground had not been seen.  The branches of the cherry trees gleamed—­not with flowers, but with icicles—­as they leaned against the windows of the bed-chamber under the roof.  Sometimes as the winter blast stirred them, they knocked against the panes with a sound the knuckles of a skeleton might have made.  There was not the slightest suggestion of the soft-voiced “Ligeia” in that harsh, horrible sound.

Upon the bed the girl-wife lay well nigh as still and as white as the snow outside.  Now and again she coughed—­a weak, ghostly sort of cough.  Over her wasted body, in addition to the thin bed-clothing, lay her husband’s old military cape.  Against her breast nestled Catalina, purring contentedly while she kept the heart of her mistress warm a little longer.  Near the foot of her bed the Mother sat—­a more perfect picture than ever of the Mater Dolorosa—­chafing the tiny cold feet; at the head her husband bent over her and chafed her hands.  About the room, but not near enough to intrude upon the sacred grief of the stricken mother and husband, sat several of the good women whose friendship had been the mainstay of the three.  Through the window, gaining brilliance from the ice-laden branches outside, fell the rays of the setting sun, glorifying the room and the bed.  Scarce a word was spoken, but upon the request of the dying girl for music one of the visitors began to sing in low, tremulous tones, the beautiful old hymn, “Jerusalem the Golden.”  To the man, bowed beneath his woe as it had been a physical weight, the words came as a knell, and a blacker despair than ever settled upon his wild eyes and haggard face.  To his dying wife they were a promise—­the smile upon her lip and the look of wonder in her eyes showed that she was already beholding the glories of which the old hymn told.