It was the day after Ida's burial--Haldane's wife's burial. A week ago he had taken her to a city hospital, and she had died there--she and her baby--in the night, away from Haldane. He had gone dazedly, very conscientiously, through the dreadful, relentless activity that follows immediately on the heels of death; there was some alleviation in the thought that everything had been done just as _she_ would have liked to have it. To-day the house was free of the grieving, sickening smell of flowers; the last of the people had mercifully fulfilled their duty to Ida and him and had gone, leaving him the humiliation of their honest, warm-hearted words and halting phrases of sympathy. "Great God!" he had kept saying to himself as he listened to them, "if you _knew_,--if you _knew_!" At times he felt, as he thought of those friends, secretly resentful. "If it hadn't been for them, I don't believe I," he caught himself saying--"I'd ever have married." But again he stopped his mental train abruptly. It was such a wearisome business, this "being fair"--he put it so--to _her_; this conscientious erasing of self-justification which he felt to be so unworthy. It would have been such a relief to Haldane to be, for an hour, obliviously selfish in his estimate of his two years of marriage with Ida. There had been nothing, after all, remarkable in Haldane's experience--save for him; nothing very far removed from the commonplace. His father--a simple-hearted musician--had trained his son in music since the days when the lad could first hold a violin under his little chin. He had died when the boy was twenty, and Haldane had gone on, contentedly enough and absorbed, to take his father's place among the violins of an orchestra, and to teach music. As he grew older his father's friends told him he was leading a wretchedly lonely life; that he ought to marry. And at this Haldane smiled his deprecating, affectionate smile--a smile that, somehow, convinced his advisers in their own wisdom. When Ida Locke came to live in a hall bedroom of the untidy boarding-house Haldane for years had called home, it was not long before she, too, quite unaffectedly, took to the idea that the good-natured musician needed "looking after." And since, all her life, she had tremendously given herself to the care of people around her, it was no unusual experience--she sought it frankly, importantly. It is scarcely probable that, in the beginning, any thought of ultimate marriage entered her head. Those who knew her invariably said, "Ida is a sensible girl." Rather, her "looking after" Haldane took itself out in the hearty channels of dry boots, overshoes, tea of late afternoons, candid suggestions as to proper winter underwear, remedies for his frequent colds. This solicitude--which was, in essence, quite maternal--made a bond between the two; this and the fact that they both were workers--for Ida taught English in a private school.