The house was sold to satisfy the mortgage, and Anna rented two rooms on the third floor of the tall building that overshadowed the shoemaker’s dwelling to the left. Here she established herself as a dressmaker, but for a while found little custom. Karl and Dora had been her true friends throughout, with that sort of friendship which resides not only in the heart but the pocket. Indeed, but for them it is doubtful whether she could have weathered the first six months of her widowhood; for Leppel’s relations, who were all in the Far West, had, it is true, helped with his funeral expenses, but declined to be troubled further. He had always been a sort of ugly duckling among those shrewd, close-fisted people—that quiet, silent, unpractical dreamer; but they were very sorry, notwithstanding, that, in spite of his excellent wife, he had come to such a bad end. “Under the Commune,” said Karl Metzerott, with an added bitterness derived from his own personal aggrievement, “Leppel would be alive and an honored citizen.” “I don’t know,” said Dora doubtfully. “That man in Washington, you know, says that the machine would not pay. Would the Commune adopt a machine that would not pay?” “It _would_ pay, under the Commune,” replied Karl; but as this point belonged to the domain of the unprovable, Dora did not argue upon it. “Well,” she said, “at least the Commune would not have been kinder to him than his own wife and his own relations.” “Any woman might be unkind who saw her children threatened with starvation,” he answered gloomily. “Yes,” she answered hesitatingly, loath to condemn Anna, yet feeling in her own soul, that she, Dora, would have acted very differently. Then, with a sudden brightness, “Anyway, Karl, the Commune wouldn’t make much difference to _us_. We shouldn’t be much better off, and we should not act any differently.” “We’re pretty good Communists, you and I,” he said with a grim smile, “but what have we got by it? I tell you, Dora, we’ve got to live very close for the next year or so, if we mean to catch up.” “I know it,” she answered, smiling; “and, Karl, I’ve thought of a way to save quite a lot of money. If Anna and her three children can live in two rooms, why can’t we? Then we could rent our bedroom, and, when winter comes, that would save coal. For you know we should be obliged to have a fire there on account of Louis,” she added apologetically. “If you don’t mind, I don’t,” he said carelessly. “It won’t rent for much, though; but it will give you less to do,” with a rather anxious glance at the form and face of his wife. Indeed, Dora was not looking well; she had grown very thin, and her eyes looked pathetically large and blue in her white face. But she laughed off all anxiety; she might be a little pulled down by the warm weather, she said, but that was all.