Mrs. Bolton did not live to welcome them back to Upton. The last few years had been years of vexation and loneliness to her, and there had been no one to care for her and to help her to bear her troubles. She had been ailing for some time, and the trying changes of the spring hastened her death before her favorite nephew could reach England. The hired nurses who attended her through her last illness heard her often muttering to herself, as if her enfeebled brain was possessed by one idea, "If any will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me." The words haunted her, and once she said, in an awed voice and with a look of pain, "He that taketh not up his cross and followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me." "Not worthy of me!" she repeated, mournfully, "not worthy of me!"
The rector of Upton and his wife have dwelt among their own people again for some years. Though the story is still sometimes told of Mrs. Chantrey's sin, the life she leads among them is a better lesson than perhaps it could have been had she never fallen. They see in her one who has not merely been tempted, but who has conquered and escaped from the tyranny of a vice shamefully common among us. There is hope for the feeblest and the most degraded when they hear of her, or when they learn the story from her own lips. For if by the sorrowful confession she can help any one, she does not shrink from making it, with tears often, but with a profound thankfulness for the deliverance wrought out for her by those who made themselves "fellow-workers with God."
Ann Holland found her shop and pleasant kitchen transformed into a fashionable draper's establishment, with plate glass windows down to the pavement. But she did not need a home. David and Sophy Chantrey would not have parted from her if the old house had not been gone. A few of her old-fashioned goods she managed to gather together again, to furnish her own room at the rectory, and among them was the screen containing the newspaper records of events at Upton. One long column gives a high-flown description of the rector's return to his old parish, and Ann feels a glow of pleasant pride at seeing her own name there in print.