It had been Forester's habit to close the shop a little early on that evening, going around to the church to walk home with her, getting in before the last hymn to save his face with the minister by a show of regular attendance. But on this evening customers detained him beyond his usual hour, so that by the time he reached the corner opposite the church, he saw the people dribbling out by twos and threes, across the lighted doorway, and noted that my mother was not with them. He thought she might have slipped out earlier and gone around to the shop for him as occasionally happened, but seeing the lights did not go out at once in the church, he looked in to make sure, and saw her still sitting in her accustomed place. The sexton and the organist, who were fussing together about a broken pedal, appeared not to have observed her there, and one of them was reaching up to put out the light when Forester touched her on the shoulder. She started and seemed to come awake with an effort, and on the way home she stumbled once or twice in a manner that led him, totally unaccustomed as he was to think of my mother as ill in any sort, to get a little entertainment out of it by gentle rallying, which was dropped when he discovered that it caused her genuine, pained embarrassment. The following Tuesday he came home to the midday meal to find her lying on the floor, inarticulate and hardly conscious. There must have been two strokes in close succession, for she had managed after falling, to get a cushion from the worn sitting-room lounge under her head and to pull a shawl partly over her. Effie, who was at Montecito, was summoned home, and that evening, by the doctor's advice, the telegram was sent which separated me so opportunely from the Shamrocks. By the time I reached her, speech had returned in a measure, and by the end of a fortnight she was able to be lifted into the chair which she never afterward left. I remember as if it were yesterday, the noble outline of her face and of her head against the pillows, the smooth hair parted Madonna-wise and brought low across her ears, the blue of her eyes looking out of the dark, swollen circles, for all her fifty-two years, with the unawakened clarity of a girl's. Stricken as I was from my first realizing contact with sin, and my identification with it through the assumed passions of the stage, it grew upon me during the days of my mother's illness that there was a kind of intrinsic worth in her which I, with all my powers, must forever and inalienably miss. With it there came a kind of exasperation, never quite to leave me, of the certainty of not choosing my own values, but of being driven with them aside and apart.