Muffles -- the Bar-Keep by Francis Hopkinson Smith

A year passed.

I had been painting along the Thames, lying in my punt, my face up to the sky, or paddling in and out among the pond-lilies. I had idled, too, on the lagoons of my beloved Venice, listening to Luigi crooning the songs he loves so well, the soft air about me, the plash of my gondolier's oar wrinkling the sheen of the silver sea. It had been a very happy summer; full of color and life. The brush had worked easily, the weather had lent a helping hand; all had been peace and quiet. Ofttimes, when I was happiest, somehow Muffles's solitary figure rose before me, the tears coursing down his cheeks, and with it that cold silence -- a silence which only a dead body brings to a house and which ends only with its burial.