Page:The Black Cat v01no03 (1895-12).pdf/48

46 The burden of life would be doubly worse with the material leisure money could bring, but Frazer had never stopped toiling all his days. He could not.

Money in the helpless hands of his wife meant only unwelcome care for her, and their exclusion in a larger, isolated home was in no sense different from life in their cabin.

Frazer held himself aloof from the movement of the growing towns and cities, and watched the weak physical fiber of his children, marked by their unambitious Southern strain. Energy for acquirement of any sort was not theirs, and for his family his money meant only the material supply of food and clothes.

From this very home on the reservoir banks he had gone to his mines with a regularity interrupted only when it was necessary to follow the coffin of one of his children to the rocky, shrub-dotted cemetery on the hills. There had been three of them, and none of the apparently sturdy children had escaped the fatal collapse of consumption.

That morning he had driven there the fourth time. The body of his wife was laid under the ground after her thirty years of faithful care, according to her light. And Frazer was alone with his money, and his love, and the suffering he had made it his business to bear.