r the
patient boy's on the same theatre, once more to connect it--but how
differently!--with decay and death, is stretched there, wakeful and
complaining. Ugly and haggard it lies upon its bed of unrest; and by it,
in the terror of her unimpassioned loveliness--for it has terror in
the sufferer's failing eyes--sits Edith. What do the waves say, in the
stillness of the night, to them?

'Edith, what is that stone arm raised to strike me? Don't you see it?'

There is nothing, mother, but your fancy.'

'But my fancy! Everything is my fancy. Look! Is it possible that you
don't see it?'

'Indeed, mother, there is nothing. Should I sit unmoved, if there were
any such thing there?'

'Unmoved?' looking wildly at her--'it's gone now--and why are you
so unmoved? That is not my fancy, Edith. It turns me cold to see you
sitting at my side.'

'I am sorry, mother.'

'Sorry! You seem always sorry. But it is not for me!'

With that, she cries; and tossing her restless head from side to side
upon her pillow, runs on about neglect, and the mother she has been, and
the mother the good old creature was, whom they met, and the cold return
the daughters of such mothers make. In the midst of her incoherence,
she stops, looks at her daughter, cries out that her wits are going, and
hides her face upon the bed.

Edith, in compassion, bends over her and speaks to her. The sick old
woman clutches her round the neck, and says, with a look of horror,

'Edith! we are going home soon; going back. You mean that I shall go
home again?'

'Yes, mother, yes.'

'And what he said--what's-his-name, I never could remember
names--Major--that dreadful word, when we came away--it's not true?
Edith!' with a shriek and a stare, 'it's not that that is the matter
with me.'

Night after night, the lights burn in the window, and the figure lies
upon the bed, and Edith sits beside it, and the restless waves are
calling to them both the whole night long. Night after night, the waves
are hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon
the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds are on
their trackless flight; the white arms beckon, in the moonlight, to the
invisible country far away.

And still the sick old woman looks into the corner, where the stone
arm--part of a figure of some tomb, she says--is raised to strike her.
At last it falls; and then a dumb old woman lies upon the the bed, and
she is crooked and shrunk up