When RoBards drowsily asked what had made her cry, she sat on the edge of his bed and read to him. Whether it were the contagion of her grief or the skill of the author, he felt himself driven almost to tears. He flung a blanket about Patty’s quivering shoulders and clung to her, wondering at this mystery of the world: that lovers long dead in obscurity, and lovers who had never lived at all, should be made to walk so vividly through the landscapes of imagination that thousands of strangers should weep for them. Or was it for their woes that one wept? Or for one’s own in the masquerade of other names and scenes? CHAPTER XXXVI The tenderest moods of devotion and shared sorrows alternated with wrangles so bitter that murder seemed to hang in the air. Money was the root of most of the quarreling. When RoBards was about ready to give up and sink like a broken-backed camel under the incessant rain of last straws, there came a wind out of heaven and lifted the bills like petals swept from a peach tree. Old Mrs. Roswell was found dead in her bed one morning. RoBards grieved for the poor old skinflint, and wondered how he would get along without her fees. Then her last will was turned up and in it she bequeathed to him ten thousand dollars in gold and a parcel of land which she had bought in when it was sold for taxes. It lay out beyond the Reservoir on Murray’s Hill, an abandoned farm. But he had hopes that it would one day prove of value, for there was talk of grading Fifth Avenue from Thirty-fourth Street out to Forty-fifth. And the World’s Fair which had been opened on July 4, 1852, in the magnificent Crystal Palace built next the Reservoir, taught the public that Forty-second Street was not quite the North Pole. And though it was a failure it had revealed the charm of this region. There was, indeed, a movement on foot to create a great park out there to be called Central Park. That would involve the purchase of the land by the city. The “Forty Thieves,” as the aldermen were called, would pay enough for it to leave themselves a tidy sum. But RoBards was to learn that windfalls from heaven bring no permanent rescue. Patty was incensed at the thought of devoting any of that unforeseen ten thousand dollars to the payment of bills for worn-out dresses and extravagances of the past. She had given a ball for Immy on her nineteenth birthday in the desperate hope that the girl would capture a husband before she began to fade, but though there were lovers enough, none of them seemed to account her a sufficiently attractive match.