iding the property where it rightfully belonged, between the wife and
children.

Early in February Mrs. Carr died. It was more like a going to sleep than
like a death. She lay for two days in a dozing state, smiling whenever
Mercy spoke to her, and making great efforts to swallow food whenever
Mercy offered it to her. At last she closed her eyes, turned her head on
one side, as if for a sounder sleep, and never moved again.

However we may think we are longing for the release from suffering to come
to one we love, when it does come, it is a blow, is a shock. Hundreds of
times Mercy had said to herself in the course of the winter, "Oh, if God
would only take my mother to heaven! Her death would be easier to bear
than this." But now she would have called her back, if she could. The
silent house, the empty room, still more terrible the long empty hours in
which nobody needed her help, all wrung Mercy's heart. It was her first
experience of being alone. She had often pictured to herself, or rather
she thought she had, what it would be; but no human imagination can ever
sound the depths of that word: only the heart can feel it. It is a marvel
that hearts do not break under it oftener than they do. The silence which
is like that darkness which could be felt; the sudden awakening in the
night with a wonder what it means that the loved one is not there; the
pitiless morning light which fills the empty house, room after room; and
harder than all else to forget, to rise above--the perpetual sense of no
future: even the little near futures of the next hour, the next day, all
cut off, all closed, to the human being left utterly alone. The mockery of
the instincts of hunger and need of rest seems cruel. What a useless
routine, for one left alone, to be fed, to sleep, and to rise up to eat
and sleep again!

Mercy bore all this in a sort of dumb bewilderment for a few days. All
Stephen's love and sympathy did not help her. He was unutterably tender
and sympathizing now that poor old Mrs. Carr was fairly out of his way. It
surprised even himself to see what a sort of respectful affection he felt
for her in her grave. Any misgiving that this new quiet and undisturbed
possession of Mercy might not continue did not cross his mind; and when
Mercy said to him suddenly, one evening about ten days after her mother's
death, "Stephen, I must go away, I can't live in this house another week,"
it was almost as sudden a shock to him as if he had