'
'Your hopes and ambitions were so simple,' I would say, but she did
not like that. 'They werena that simple,' she would answer,
flushing.
I am reluctant to leave those happy days, but the end must be
faced, and as I write I seem to see my mother growing smaller and
her face more wistful, and still she lingers with us, as if God had
said, 'Child of mine, your time has come, be not afraid.' And she
was not afraid, but still she lingered, and He waited, smiling. I
never read any of that last book to her; when it was finished she
was too heavy with years to follow a story. To me this was as if
my book must go out cold into the world (like all that may come
after it from me), and my sister, who took more thought for others
and less for herself than any other human being I have known, saw
this, and by some means unfathomable to a man coaxed my mother into
being once again the woman she had been. On a day but three weeks
before she died my father and I were called softly upstairs. My
mother was sitting bolt upright, as she loved to sit, in her old
chair by the window, with a manuscript in her hands. But she was
looking about her without much understanding. 'Just to please
him,' my sister whispered, and then in a low, trembling voice my
mother began to read. I looked at my sister. Tears of woe were
stealing down her face. Soon the reading became very slow and
stopped.
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