n both illusions and realities into the embroidered
fabric of Life.

For six months she went about the house and helped Virginia with the
sewing, which had become burdensome since the children, and especially
Harry, were big enough to wear daily holes in their stockings. Then,
when the half year was over, she took to her bed one evening after she
had carefully undressed, folded her clothes out of sight, and read a
chapter in her Bible. In the morning she did not get up, and at the end
of a fortnight, in which she apologized for making extra work whenever
food was brought to her, she clasped her hands on her thin breast,
smiled once into Virginia's face, and died so quietly that there was
hardly a perceptible change in her breathing. She had gone through life
without giving trouble, and she gave none at the end. As she lay there
in her little bed in Virginia's spare room, to which she had moved after
Gabriel's death in order that the rectory might be got ready for the new
rector, she appeared so shadowy and unearthly that it was impossible to
believe that she had ever been a part of the restless strivings and the
sombre violences of life. On the candle-stand by her bed lay her
spectacles, with steel rims because she had never felt that she could
afford gold ones; and a single October rose, from which a golden petal
had dropped, stood in a vase beside the Bible. On the foot of the bed
hung her grey flannelette wrapper, with a patch in one sleeve over which
Harry had spilled a bottle of shoe polish, while through the
half-shuttered window the autumn sunshine fell in long yellow bars over
the hemp rugs on the floor. And she was dead! Her mother was dead--no
matter how much she needed her, she would never come back. Out of the
vacancy around her, some words of her own, spoken in her girlhood,
returned to her. "There is only one thing I couldn't bear, and that is
losing my mother." Only one thing! And now that one thing had happened,
and she was not only bearing it, she was looking ahead to a future in
which that one thing would be always beside her, always in her memory.
Whatever the years brought to her, they could never bring her mother
again--they could never bring her a love like her mother's.

Out of that same vacancy, which seemed to swallow and to hold
everything, which seemed to exist both within and outside of herself, a
multitude of forgotten images and impressions flashed into being. She
saw the nursery fireside