When the buggy had disappeared, she retraced her steps to the house and entered her mother's room with a smile on her lips. "You'll have to rest now, Ma, no matter how you hate it." At Dorinda's cheerful voice, the old woman turned over and looked at her daughter as if she were a stranger. "I don't know how you'll manage," she answered; but her tone was perfunctory. "Oh, we'll manage all right. Don't you worry. Just try to get well, Ma." A change of expression rippled like a shadow over the grey features, and passed without leaving a trace. "I was afraid maybe the doctor didn't think I was sick enough to stay in bed. I know I ain't exactly sick, but I seem to have given way. I reckon Mary Joe can look after the chickens till I'm able to be up." After this she fell into a doze from which she did not awaken until Dorinda brought her favourite dinner of jowl and turnip salad. "The doctor says you must eat, Ma, or you'll never get back your strength." "I know I ought to, daughter, but I feel as if something was choking me." Day after day, month after month. Nothing else all through the autumn and winter. Though Mrs. Oakley lived more than a year longer, she was never able again to leave her bed. For the greater part of the time she lay, silent and inert, in a state between waking and sleeping, unconcerned after all her fruitless endeavours. Rufus, she never asked for, and when his letters were read to her, she would smile vaguely and turn away as if she had ceased to be interested. Old Rambler spent his days on a mat at the side of her bed, and Flossie lay curled up on the patchwork quilt over her feet. If they were absent long, she would begin to move restlessly, and beg presently that they should be brought back. At the end, they were the only companions that she desired, for, as she said once, they "did not bother her with questions." The tragedy to Dorinda was not so much in her mother's slow dying as in her unconditional surrender to decay. For more than forty years she had fought her dauntless fight against the sordid actuality, and at the last she appeared to become completely reconciled to her twin enemies, poverty and dirt. Nothing made any difference to her now, and because nothing made any difference to her, dying was the happiest part of her life. "There ain't any use struggling," she said once, while Dorinda was cleaning her room, and after a long pause, "It doesn't seem just right that we have to be born. It ain't worth all the trouble we go through."