I hastened to reduce the room to something like order, to mend the fire and prepare some tea and rather doubtful toast, and when I had placed her in her chair and her eyes took in the familiar picture of the lake, they cleared perceptibly. She nodded her head and murmured: “Yes, my dearies, yes! I’m waiting for the sign, you won’t be long now! no, not long, not long!” I came to her, then, with the tea and the toast, and was delighted when she called me “you girl” again, and hoped she would scold me about the fire I had made, but she scolded me no more forever. She had asked so many times for breakfast, yet now she could not eat one morsel, but she drank her tea like one famishing. While I arranged her bed, she babbled on, and most of the time she talked to her children. Once, however, she declared that if Sally stole another cracker she would throw her from the window, and vowed no one in town would be fool enough to pick her and her vocabulary up. When I was smoothing her white hair into something like its usual order, one lock escaped my fingers and fell forward on her chest. She saw it and cried out: “They have cut it off, oh, curse them! curse them! Betty, do you see? It’s gone, and--” she paused, looking curiously at the thin, glittering strand of hair--“and, Betty, either I’ve gone mad or it’s quite white! Oh, Betty, I _can’t_ understand!” And so, as Betty--some long-dead Betty from her past--I put the suffering woman back into her great skeleton of a bed, and smoothed her brow and wet her lips times uncountable, wondering at the heat in her dry, parchment-like skin, while I tried to decide what ought to be done in this emergency. I felt that a doctor should be summoned, but I stood in absolute awe of her will, her commands, and I knew her fixed determination never to have a physician’s care. She held “she _could_ not die, no matter what her ailments, until she had ‘the sign,’ and that when ‘the sign’ had once been given no power on earth could keep her here.” So I dared not summon proper help; my next thought had been, naturally enough, of Mrs. Bulkley, the only friend of the old days left to her, but as fate would have it, Mrs. Bulkley was absent from the city on business that would detain her two or three days. Had I not heard my friend Mary rejoicing the night before over the very “high Jinks” the boarders were hoping to enjoy during that absence?