an agony of brain and
flesh; and yet it was, of course, but a mere symbol and
shadow of the manifold agony she had gone through. I will not
attempt to describe what I felt--what the man who knows that
his neglect and selfishness drove her the first steps along
this infernal road must feel to his last hour.--But at last
we were able--the nurse and I--to soothe her a little. The
nightmare lifted, we gave her food, and the nurse brushed her
poor brown hair, and tied round it, loosely, the little black
scarf she likes to wear. We lifted her on her pillows, and
her white face grew calm, and so lovely--though, as we
thought, very near to death. Her hair, which was cut in
prison, had grown again a little--to her neck, and could not
help curling. It made her look a child again--poor, piteous
child!--so did the little scarf, tied under her chin--and the
tiny proportions to which all her frame had shrunk.

"She lifted her face to mine, as I bent over her, kissed me,
and asked for you. You were brought, and I took you on my
knee, showing you pictures, to keep you quiet. But every
other minute, almost, your eyes looked away from the book to
her, with that grave considering look, as though a question
were behind the look, to which your little brain could not
yet give shape. My strange impression was that the question
was there--in the mind--fully formed, like the Platonic
'ideas' in heaven; but that, physically, there was no power
to make the word-copy that could have alone communicated it
to us. Your mother looked at you in return, intently--quite
still. When you began to get restless, I lifted you up to
kiss her; you were startled, perhaps, by the cold of her
face, and struggled away. A little color came into her
cheeks; she followed you hungrily with her eyes as you were
carried off; then she signed to me, and it was my hand that
brushed away her tears.

"Immediately afterward she began to speak, with wonderful
will and self-control, and she asked me that till you were
grown up and knowledge became inevitable, I should tell you
nothing. There was to be no talk of her, no picture of her,
no letters. As far as possible, during your childhood and
youth, she was to be to you as though she had never existed.
What her thought was exactly sh