her eyes in sleep. Sometimes, as she sat alone in the arm-chair in
her room, she would begin laughing and crying at the same time, with a
sort of tearless grief, or else relapse into convulsions, and scream out
dreadful, incoherent words in a horrible voice. It was the first dire
sorrow which she had known in her life, and it reduced her almost
to distraction. She would begin accusing first one person, and then
another, of bringing this misfortune upon her, and rail at and blame
them with the most extraordinary virulence, Finally she would rise from
her arm-chair, pace the room for a while, and end by falling senseless
to the floor.

Once, when I went to her room, she appeared to be sitting quietly in her
chair, yet with an air which struck me as curious. Though her eyes were
wide open, their glance was vacant and meaningless, and she seemed to
gaze in my direction without seeing me. Suddenly her lips parted slowly
in a smile, and she said in a touchingly, tender voice: "Come here,
then, my dearest one; come here, my angel." Thinking that it was myself
she was addressing, I moved towards her, but it was not I whom she was
beholding at that moment. "Oh, my love," she went on, "if only you could
know how distracted I have been, and how delighted I am to see you once
more!" I understood then that she believed herself to be looking
upon Mamma, and halted where I was. "They told me you were gone," she
concluded with a frown; "but what nonsense! As if you could die before
ME!" and she laughed a terrible, hysterical laugh.

Only those who can love strongly can experience an overwhelming grief.
Yet their very need of loving sometimes serves to throw off their grief
from them and to save them. The moral nature of man is more tenacious of
life than the physical, and grief never kills.

After a time Grandmamma's power of weeping came back to her, and she
began to recover. Her first thought when her reason returned was for us
children, and her love for us was greater than ever. We never left her
arm-chair, and she would talk of Mamma, and weep softly, and caress us.

Nobody who saw her grief could say that it was consciously exaggerated,
for its expression was too strong and touching; yet for some reason or
another my sympathy went out more to Natalia Savishna, and to this day
I am convinced that nobody loved and regretted Mamma so purely and
sincerely as did that simple-hearted, affectionate being.

With Mamma's death the hap