dded happiness had been the fact that my
Mother and he were of one mind in the interpretation of Sacred
Prophecy. Looking back, it appears to me that this unusual mental
exercise was almost their only relaxation, and that in their
economy it took the place which is taken, in profaner families,
by cards or the piano. It was a distraction; it took them
completely out of themselves. During those melancholy weeks at
Pimlico, I read aloud another work of the same nature as those of
Habershon and Jukes, the _Horae Apocalypticae_ of a Mr. Elliott.
This was written, I think, in a less disagreeable style, and
certainly it was less opaquely obscure to me. My recollection
distinctly is that when my Mother could endure nothing else, the
arguments of this book took her thoughts away from her pain and
lifted her spirits. Elliott saw 'the queenly arrogance of Popery'
everywhere, and believed that the very last days of Babylon the
Great were came. Lest I say what may be thought extravagant, let
me quote what my Father wrote in his diary at the time of my
Mother's death. He said that the thought that Rome was doomed (as
seemed not impossible in 1857) so affected my Mother that it
'irradiated' her dying hours with an assurance that was like 'the
light of the Morning Star, the harbinger of the rising sun'.

After our return to Islington, there was a complete change in my
relation to my Mother. At Pimlico, I had been all-important, her
only companion, her friend, her confidant. But now that she was
at home again, people and things combined to separate me from
her. Now, and for the first time in my life, I no longer slept in
her room, no longer sank to sleep under her kiss, no longer saw
her mild eyes smile on me with the earliest sunshine. Twice a
day, after breakfast and before I went to rest, I was brought to
her bedside; but we were never alone; other people, sometimes
strange people, were there. We had no cosy talk; often she was
too weak to do more than pat my hand; her loud and almost
constant cough terrified and harassed me. I felt, as I stood,
awkwardly and shyly, by her high bed, that I had shrunken into a
very small and insignificant figure, that she was floating out of
my reach, that all things, but I knew not what nor how, were
corning to an end. She herself was not herself; her head, that
used to be held so erect, now rolled or sank upon the pillow; the
sparkle was all extinguished from those bright, dear eyes. I
could not