“My mother has some good things too, if all the corners were cleared, that are of no use to her, but that would come in very well for the girls,” said Mrs. MacKell; and with these kind and reverential thoughts they met their mother, who perhaps also--who knows?--had in her day been covetous of things that would come in for the girls. This was the easy and cheerful view which the family took of the circumstances altogether. Not one of them intended to be unkind. They were all quite determined that she should “want for nothing;” but still it was, on the whole, rather “a ploy” and pleasant expedition, this family assembly, which had been convened for the purpose of dethroning its head. CHAPTER V. The Family Martyr. I need not say that the feelings with which the old woman awaited the decision of her fate were of a very different character. She had lain awake almost the whole night, thinking over the long life which she had spent within those walls. She had been married at eighteen, and now she was seventy. I wonder whether she felt in herself one tithe of the difference which these words imply. I do not believe she did; except at special moments we never feel ourselves old; we are, to ourselves, what we always were, the same creature, inexhaustible, unchangeable, notwithstanding all vulgar exterior transformation. Poor old Mrs. Murray at seventy, poor, aged, ruined, upon whom her children were to sit that day and give forth her sentence of banishment, her verdict of destitution, never more to call anything her own, to lodge in the house of another, to eat a stranger’s bread--was to her own knowledge the same girl, eighteen years old, who had opened bright eyes in that chamber in those early summer mornings fifty years ago when life was so young. Fifty years passed before her as she lay with her eyes turned to the wall. How many joys in them, how many sorrows! how tired she had lain down, how lightly risen up, how many plans she had pondered there, how many prayers she had murmured unheard of by any but God, prayers, many of them never answered, many forgotten even by herself, some, which she remembered best, granted almost as soon as said. How she had cried and wept in an agony, for example, for the life of her youngest child, and how it had been better almost from that hour! The child was her daughter, Mrs. MacKell, now a virtuous mother of a family; but after all to her own mother, perhaps it would not now have mattered very much had that prayer dropped unheard. How many recollections there are to look back on in seventy years, and how bewildering the effort to remember whether the dreamer lying there is eighteen, or forty, or seventy! and she to be judged and sentenced and know her doom to-day.