In these few hours I found that a great change had taken place,--still the same hot flush on the cheeks, but the eyes sunken, and without the slightest look of consciousness, and her breath coming in short quick gasps. I trembled all over. Through the door open into the boudoir beyond, I could see the old clergyman, Pastor Dilthey, who had officiated both at my mother’s confirmation and at her marriage, sitting there in his full canonicals, grave and imposing, waiting to perform the last solemn rites. The room was left in darkness, only the first rays of morning stealing in through the closed shutters flickered strangely here and there, and fell over the old pastor’s silvery hair, making his pale serious face look still more grave and pale. I watched him from the doorway, but felt in too great awe to go up and speak to him, so I stole up quietly to grandmamma’s writing-table, and looked once more at all the little articles standing on it, with which I had sometimes been allowed to play and all of which had the scent of the filagree vinaigrettes she kept among them. The hands of the little clock there already pointed to four,--when she suddenly began to breathe a little more freely, and the danger seemed no longer so imminent. We knelt round her bed, without a sound, except when one or other of her daughters, unable to control her sobs, was immediately called to order by my mother lest the calm of the death-bed should be disturbed. And so the hours passed. I grew more and more tired. Then, between one and two o’clock that afternoon, a terrific storm broke out. The open windows banged to and fro, the rain splashed and dashed against the window-panes, the thunder rolled, and grandmamma’s breath came in fitful gasps. She could no longer swallow even the few drops of water that were held to her lips. So the storm raged on, and her breathing grew more painful and irregular, and I knelt on like the rest at her bedside, when suddenly I knew no more, all grew dark before my eyes, and I had fallen forward, my dark curls streaming across my mother’s feet, fast asleep. Or was it perhaps in reality faintness that had overcome me, and that then passed into the sound sleep of childhood, worn out as I was with the unwonted hours of watching and fasting I had gone through? It is very possible, for I had eaten nothing for the last four-and-twenty hours, and was exhausted with kneeling and with all the tears I had shed. When I came to myself again, the storm had spent its fury, the flashes of lightning were less frequent, the thunder only went on rumbling in the distance, the rain had stopped, and a ray of sunshine streamed into the room and right across the face of the dying woman, whose breathing was still slower and feebler. At last, as the big belfry clocks in the town began to strike the hour, one after the other, there were still longer pauses between the gasps for breath. I saw then for the first time what it means to smile from sheer despair.