said, 'Child of mine, your time has come, be not afraid.' And she
was not afraid, but still she lingered, and He waited, smiling. I
never read any of that last book to her; when it was finished she
was too heavy with years to follow a story. To me this was as if
my book must go out cold into the world (like all that may come
after it from me), and my sister, who took more thought for others
and less for herself than any other human being I have known, saw
this, and by some means unfathomable to a man coaxed my mother into
being once again the woman she had been. On a day but three weeks
before she died my father and I were called softly upstairs. My
mother was sitting bolt upright, as she loved to sit, in her old
chair by the window, with a manuscript in her hands. But she was
looking about her without much understanding. 'Just to please
him,' my sister whispered, and then in a low, trembling voice my
mother began to read. I looked at my sister. Tears of woe were
stealing down her face. Soon the reading became very slow and
stopped. After a pause, 'There was something you were to say to
him,' my sister reminded her. 'Luck,' muttered a voice as from the
dead, 'luck.' And then the old smile came running to her face like
a lamp-lighter, and she said to me, 'I am ower far gone to read,
but I'm thinking I am in it again!' My father put her Testament in
her hands, and it fell open - as it always does - at the Fourteenth
of John. She made an effort to read but could not. Suddenly she
stooped and kissed the broad page. 'Will that do instead?' she
asked.




CHAPTER X - ART THOU AFRAID HIS POWER SHALL FAIL?