"I was all by myself with her. There wasn't another living soul in the house," sobbed the little dressmaker. "She fell over just like that, with her face all twisted, while I was talking to her."
"Oh, poor mother, poor mother!" cried the girl as she ran upstairs. "Is she in her room, and who is with her?"
"The doctor has been there for over an hour, and he says that she'll never be able to move again. Oh, Susan, how will she stand it?"
But Susan had already outstripped her, and was entering the sick-room, where Mrs. Treadwell lay unconscious, with her distorted face turned toward the door, as though she were watching expectantly for some one who would never come. As the girl fell on her knees beside the couch, her happiness seemed to dissolve like mist before the grim facts of mortal anguish and death. It was not until dawn, when the night's watch was over and she stood alone beside her window, that she said to herself with all the courage she could summon:
"And it's over for me, too. Everything is over for me, too. Oh, poor, poor mother!"
Love, which had seemed to her last night the supreme spirit in the universe, had surrendered its authority to the diviner image of Duty.
CHAPTER IV
HER CHILDREN
"Poor Aunt Belinda was paralyzed last night, Oliver," said Virginia the next morning at breakfast. "Miss Willy Whitlow just brought me a message from Susan. She spent the night there and was on her way this morning to ask mother to go."