_She_ did not shrink. She was sitting close beside it. She gazed at it with the tenderness which death itself could not affright. Mother was not crying. She did not look as if she had shed tears for a long time. But her wanness and the drawn lines about her mouth were hard to see. Her aged hands trembled as she cut the locks of hair from the neck of the dead. She was growing to be an old woman. And I--her first-born--I had been her staff of life, and on me she had thought to lean in her widowed age. She seemed to me to have grown feeble fast in the time since I had left her. All my soul rushed to my lips, and I cried out--it seemed that either the dead or the living must hear that cry-- “Mother! Oh, my dear _mother_!” But deaf as life, she sat before me. She had just cut off the lock of hair she wanted; as I spoke, the curling ends of it twined around her fingers; I tried to snatch it away, thinking thus to arrest her attention. The lock of hair trembled, turned, and clung the closer to the living hand. She pressed it to her lips with the passion of desolation. “But, Mother,” I cried once more, “I am _here_.” I flung my arms about her and kissed her again and again. I called and entreated her by every dear name that household love had taught us. I besought her to turn, to see, to hear, to believe, to be comforted. I told her how blest was I, how bountiful was death. “I am alive,” I said. “I am alive! I see you, I touch you, hear you, love you, hold you!” I tried argument and severity; I tried tenderness and ridicule. She turned at this: it seemed to me that she regarded me. She stretched her arms out; her aged hands groped to and fro as if she felt for something and found it not; she shook her head, her dim eyes gazed blankly into mine. She sighed patiently, and rose as if to leave the room, but hesitated,--covered the face of the dead body--caressed it once or twice as if it had been a living infant--and then, taking up her Bible, which had been upon the chair beside her, dropped upon her knees, and holding the book against her sunken cheek, abandoned herself to silent prayer. This was more than I could bear just then, and, thinking to collect myself by a few moments’ solitude, I left her. But as I stood in the dark hall, uncertain and unquiet, I noticed a long, narrow line of light at my feet, and, following it confusedly, found that it came from the crack in the closed, but unlatched door of another well-remembered room. I pushed the door open hurriedly and closed it behind me.