"If not now," I said, "I must see her to-morrow."
"You shall see her," said Mrs. Fortress, "within the next twenty-four hours."
I passed the evening in my cottage, trying to read. I could not fix my mind upon the page. I indulged in weird fancies, and once, putting out the lights, cried:
"If the Angel of Death is near, let him appear!"
There was no sign, and I sat in the dark till I heard a tapping at my door. I opened it, and heard Mrs. Fortress's voice.
"You can see your mother," she said.
I accompanied her to the sick room, the bedside of my mother. She was dead.
"It is a happy release," Mrs. Fortress said.
[CHAPTER V.]
This event, which set me completely free, caused a repetition of certain formalities. The doctor visited me, and regaled me with doleful words and sighs. In the course of conversation I endeavoured to extract from him some information as to the peculiar form of illness from which my mother had been so long a sufferer, but all the satisfaction I could obtain from him was that she had always been "weak, very weak," and always "low, very low," and that she had for years been "gradually wasting away." She suffered from "sleeplessness," she suffered from "nerves," her pulse was too quick, her heart was too slow, and so on, and so on. His speech was full of feeble medical platitudes, and threw no light whatever upon the subject.