"If she is ill," I cried, "I must go to her. She will want me."

He shook his head, still holding to my hands.

"No, she does not want you, Tom," he said. "The one thing that will make
her happy is the thought that you are quite removed from danger. I
believed my place was at her bedside, but she would not permit it."

And then he told me, with glistening eyes, that my old mammy, who had
been my mother's thirty years before, was nursing her and would not be
sent away. She had burst in the door of the plague chamber the moment
she had heard that her mistress was ill, and dared any one disturb her.
Old Doctor Brayle had commanded that she be given her will, and declared
that in this old negro woman's careful nursing lay my mother's great
chance of life.

The scalding tears poured down my cheeks as Mr. Fontaine told me
this,--the first, I think, that I had shed that week, for after that
dreadful night, my sorrow had been of a dry and bitter kind,--and a
stinging remorse seized me as I thought of the times I had been cross and
disobedient to mammy. Ah, how I loved her now! It was the accustomed
irony of my life that I was never to tell her so.

Ere daylight the next morning I was seated beside my friend as he drove
me home. The river was cloaked in mist, and the dawn seemed inexpressibly
dreary. As we approached the house, I wondered to see how forlorn and
neglected it appeared. A crowd of wailing negroes surrounded the chaise
when we stopped, and I would have got out, but Mr. Fontaine held me
firmly in my seat.