"Oh, mother! as if I could live when you are taken from me! What do I live for, but you? What have I on earth but thee? Other children have father and mother, and brothers and sisters, and friends. If one is taken from them, they have others left to love and care for them, but I have nobody in the wide world but you. I could not, would not live without you." I spoke with passionate earnestness. Life without my mother! The very thought was death! I looked in her pale, beautiful face. It was more than pale,--it was wan--it was sickly. There was a purplish shadow under her soft, dark eyes, which I had not observed before, and her figure looked thin and drooping. I gazed into the sad, loving depths of her eyes, till mine were blinded with tears, when throwing my arms across her lap, I laid my face upon them, and wept and sobbed as if the doom of the motherless were already mine. "Grief does not kill, my Gabriella," she said, tenderly caressing me. "It is astonishing how much the human heart can bear without breaking. Sorrow may dry up, drop by drop, the fountain of life, but it is generally the work of years. The heart lives, though every source of joy be dead,--lives without one well-spring of happiness to quench its burning thirst,--lives in the midst of desolation, darkness, and despair. Oh, my Gabriella," she continued, with a burst of feeling that swept over her with irresistible power, and bowed her as before a stormy gust, "would to God that we might die together,--that the same almighty mandate would free us both from this prison-house of sorrow and of sin. I have prayed for resignation,--I have prayed for faith; but, O my God! I am rebellious, I am weak, I have suffered and struggled so long." She spoke in a tone of physical as well as menial agony. I was looking up in her face, and it seemed as if a dark shadow rolled over it. I sprang to my feet and screamed. Peggy, who was already on the threshold, caught her as she fell forward, and laid her on the bed as if she were a little child. She was in a fainting fit. I had seen her before in these deathlike swoons, but never had I watched with such shuddering dread to see the dawn of awakening life break upon her face. I stood at her pillow scarcely less pale and cold than herself. "This is all your doings, Miss Gabriella," muttered Peggy, while busily engaged in the task of restoration. "If you don't want to kill your mother, you must keep out of your tantrums. What's the use of going on so, I wonder,--and what's the use of my watching her as carefully as if she was made of glass, when you come like a young hurricane and break her into atoms. There,--go away and keep quiet. Let her be till she gets over this turn. I know exactly what's best for her."