"It is you that dared not to send for me," she said, in an agonized voice. Hannah turned to the bed and drew the sheet over their mother's face. "I wrote to you this afternoon, telling you that she was ill, though you had no right to be here." So the sisters had both written, and neither letter had reached its destination in time. "But she was my mother, and called for me," Margaret answered. "It was my right as well as yours to be by her." "You gave up your right," Hannah said, doggedly, "and the place is mine." But she took care not to look at Margaret, and her hands were twitching. Then Towsey came forward. "For shame, Hannah!" she said; "this is your mother's child you're speaking to, and in the presence of the dead. You can't mean that she's not to stay here." "Oh, you can't mean that I am not to stay while she is here?" Margaret said, passionately, looking towards the bed. "I think that the agony I have borne this last hour will set me free of hell, if it is true. You can think, if you like, that God has sent it me for punishment, but we needn't speak of these things," she pleaded; "I only want to stay in peace till she has gone forever." "And it's peace that God gives," said Towsey, "to them that have suffered." "You can stay," Hannah said. "It's true that she was the mother of us both, and I'd rather you had been beside her when she died than hidden there." She turned her head away quickly. "It's that I can't forgive," she added, with a break in her voice. "Hannah," said Margaret, and went a step forward, for Hannah's voice even more than her words overcame her--"Hannah, I was afraid you wouldn't let me in; you said I shouldn't enter the door." "She wasn't dying then," said Hannah, with grim sadness, "and I didn't think it would be yet; besides, one often says things--I even said them to her; but I wouldn't have had this happen for all I could see." Margaret put her hand on Hannah's arm, but Hannah stood quite rigid and stern, with her face turned towards the still form that was hidden from them. XXXII The dawn came soon in those late August days, but it seemed as if the darkness would never be at an end that night. Margaret sat in the living-room in the big chair by the fireplace; it faced the one that had been her mother's, and she looked at the arm on which she had perched herself so often in the happy morning talks of old--the mornings that were all at an end for ever and ever. She had set the door wide open and the sweet air came in, chilly, and with a strange sense of what had happened. Towsey found her presently. "We wondered where you'd got to," she said. "I went to the garden, and through the field--I wanted to think for a little while." "I made the bed in your room ready, but I suppose when you looked in it was still covered up, and you didn't feel like staying there." "I don't like staying anywhere," Margaret answered, with the restlessness that cannot find expression keen upon her.