She shook her head. "I'd rather know. Poor Ma! She is only sixty-two. It has come so suddenly."
"Suddenly." The word broke from him like an oath. "Why, the woman in there has been dying for twenty years!"
Her eyes were stony while she watched him mount into his buggy and turn the horse's head toward the gate. The wheels spun over the rocks and out into the road, as if they were revolving over the ice in her heart. Would nothing thaw the frozen lake that enveloped her being? Would she never again become living and human? The old sense of the hollowness of reality had revived. Though she knew it was her mother of whom they had been speaking, the words awoke only echoes in her thoughts. She longed with all her soul to suffer acutely; yet she could feel nothing within this colourless void in which she was imprisoned.
When the buggy had disappeared, she retraced her steps to the house and entered her mother's room with a smile on her lips.
"You'll have to rest now, Ma, no matter how you hate it."
At Dorinda's cheerful voice, the old woman turned over and looked at her daughter as if she were a stranger.
"I don't know how you'll manage," she answered; but her tone was perfunctory.
"Oh, we'll manage all right. Don't you worry. Just try to get well, Ma."
A change of expression rippled like a shadow over the grey features, and passed without leaving a trace. "I was afraid maybe the doctor didn't think I was sick enough to stay in bed. I know I ain't exactly sick, but I seem to have given way. I reckon Mary Joe can look after the chickens till I'm able to be up."
After this she fell into a doze from which she did not awaken until Dorinda brought her favourite dinner of jowl and turnip salad.