The long agonizing hours wore on. A hundred times I accused myself, "I should not have left her." At all points where I attacked myself, my wife defended me, excused me, and yet I could not clear myself--could not rest. In imagination I pictured that dear, sweet face turned toward the door, and heard that faint voice asking for me. It is true I had done many considerate things for her, but I had not done enough. Money I had given her, and a home, but I had not given her as much of my time, my service, as I might have done,--as I should have done. My going away to the city at the very moment when my presence was most necessary seemed base desertion. While she had been suffering, longing and lonely, I had been feasting. All my honors, all my writing, seemed at this moment too slight, too trivial to counter-balance my mother's need, my mother's love. Midnight came without a message, and I went to bed, slightly comforted, hoping that a turn for the better had taken place. I slept fitfully, waking again and again to the bleak possibilities of the day. A persistent vision of a gray-haired mother watching and waiting for her sons filled my brain. That she was also longing for Zulime I knew, for she loved her, and thought of her as a daughter. In this agony of remorse and fear I wore out the night, and as no word came in the morning, I ate my breakfast in half-recovered tranquillity. "It must be that she is better," Zulime said, but at nine o'clock a telegram from the doctor destroyed all hope. "Your mother is unconscious. Do not hope to find her alive," was his desolating message. Every devoted son who reads this line will shiver as I shivered. That warning came like a wind from the dark spaces of a bleak, uncharted deep. It changed my world. For twenty years my mother had been my chief care. My daily thought ran to her. Only when deeply absorbed in my work had she been absent from my conscious mind. For her I had planned, for her I had saved, for her I had built, and now----! That day was the longest, bitterest, I had ever known, for the reason that, mixed with my grief, my sense of remorse, was a feeling of utter helplessness. In desperate desire for haste I could only lumpishly wait. Another day of agony, another interminable night of pain must pass before I could reach the shadowed Homestead. Nothing could shorten the interval. Then, too, I realized that she whom I would comfort had already gone beyond my aid, beyond any comfort I could send. Over and over I repeated, "If only we had started a few days sooner!" The truth is I had failed of a son's duty just when that duty was most needed, and this conviction brought an almost intolerable ache into my throat. Nothing that Zulime could do or say removed that pain. I could not eat, and I could not rest. We reached Chicago in time to catch the night train at ten o'clock, and in almost utter mental exhaustion I fell asleep about midnight, and slept till nearly daylight.