ony
prolonged itself through the evening, and the sleep won at last was a
heavy stupor. Then the sufferer's temper gave way under the stress; she
became the torment she suffered, and tore the hearts she loved. Most of
all, she afflicted the man who had been so faithful to her misery, and
maddened him to reprisals, of which he afterward abjectly repented. Her
tongue was sharpened by pain, and pitilessly skilled to inculpate and to
punish; it pierced and burned like fire but when a good day came again
she made it up to the victims by the angelic sweetness and sanity
which they felt was her real self; the cruelty was only the mask of her
suffering.

When she was better they brought to her room anybody who was staying
with them, and she liked them to be jolly in the spacious chamber. The
pleasantest things of the house were assembled, and all its comforts
concentrated, in the place which she and they knew she should quit but
once. It was made gay with flowers and pictures; it was the salon for
those fortunate hours when she became the lightest and blithest of
the company in it, and made the youngest guest forget that there was
sickness or pain in the world by the spirit with which she ignored her
own. Her laugh became young again; she joked; she entered into what
they were doing and reading and thinking, and sent them away full of the
sympathy which in this mood of hers she had for every mood in others.
Girls sighed out their wonder and envy to her daughters when they left
her; the young men whom she captivated with her divination of their
passions or ambitions went away celebrating her supernatural knowledge
of human nature. The next evening after some night of rare and happy
excitement, the family saw her nurse carrying the pictures and flowers
and vases out of her room, in sign of her renunciation of them all,
and assembled silently, shrinkingly, in her chamber, to take each their
portion of her anguish, of the blame and the penalty. The household
adjusted itself to her humours, for she was supreme in it.

When Dan used to come home from Harvard she put on a pretty cap for
him, and distinguished him as company by certain laces hiding her wasted
frame, and giving their pathetic coquetry to her transparent wrists. He
was her favourite, and the girls acknowledged him so, and made their
fun of her for spoiling him. He found out as he grew up that her broken
health dated from his birth, and at first this deeply affected him;