I could see nothing. The night was dark and still.
"She can't be long now," my mother said. "But go and tell them they may bolt the front door. We are sure to hear her coming up the walk."
She called me back. "Tell them not to forget to put the chain on the door."
Oh, the times we had been told that!
Downstairs I found the house shut up and barred as for a siege. The maids had done their work and vanished. I was the only creature stirring. Upstairs the same. My mother seemed not to hear me come back into the room. She was lying with the candle-light on her face, and on her face the old listening fear. What made her look like that?
If there had been anything, if there had been even that old mournful sound of the wind, I could have minded less. But the night was very quiet. The house was hushed as death. And still she listened.
Now and then she would lift her eyelids suddenly, and the intense white of the eyeballs shone, while she strained to catch some sound beyond my narrower range.
I sat there by the fire a long, long time. And she never spoke—until I, unable to bear the stillness any longer, fell back for that last time on the familiar Magic—my father, and the old, beautiful days. She stirred. She folded and unfolded her hands, and then took up the theme. But in a different key.
"The more I came to understand other women's lives," she said, "the more I saw that my happiness was like the safety of a person walking a narrow plank across a chasm." Then after a moment, she added, "A question of nice equilibrium."
"I don't know how you ever bore the fall," I said.