Across the Years

by Eleanor H. Porter

If her own luxuries grew fewer, the change was so gradual that the invalid did not notice it, and always her blindness made easy the deception of those about her.

Even the move to another home was accomplished without her realizing it--she was taken to the hospital for a month’s treatment, and when the month was ended she was tenderly carried home and laid on her own bed; and she did not know that “home” now was a cheap little flat in Harlem instead of the luxurious house on the avenue where her children were born.

She was too ill to receive visitors, and was therefore all the more dependent on her daughters for entertainment.

She pitied them openly for the grief and care she had brought upon them, and in the next breath congratulated them and herself that at least they had all that money could do to smooth the difficult way. In the face of this, it naturally did not grow any easier for the girls to tell the truth--and they kept silent.

For six years Mrs. Whitmore did not step; then her limbs and back grew stronger, and she began to sit up, and to stand for a moment on her feet. Her daughters now bought the strip of Axminster carpet and laid a path across the bedroom, and another one from the bedroom door to the great chair in the sitting-room, so that her feet might not note the straw matting on the floor and question its being there.

In her own sitting-room at home--which had opened, like this, out of her bedroom--the rugs were soft and the chairs sumptuous with springs and satin damask. One such chair had been saved from the wreck--the one at the end of the strip of carpet.

Day by day and month by month the years passed. The frail little woman walked the Axminster path and sat in the tufted chair. For her there were a china cup and plate, and a cook and maids below to serve. For her the endless sewing over which Katherine and Margaret bent their backs to eke out their scanty income was a picture or a bit of embroidery, designed to while away the time.

As Margaret thought of it it seemed incredible--this tissue of fabrications that enmeshed them; but even as she wondered she knew that the very years that marked its gradual growth made now its strength.

And in a little while would come the end--a very little while, the doctor said.

Margaret tightened her lips and echoed her sister’s words: “We mustn’t give up--we mustn’t!”