Mrs. Carr had been steadily growing feebler all summer; but the change had seemed to Mercy to be more mental than physical, and she had been in a measure blinded to her mother’s real condition.  With the increase of childishness and loss of memory had come an increased gentleness and love of quiet, which partially disguised the loss of strength.  She would sit in her chair from morning till night, looking out of the window or watching the movements of those around her, with an expression of perfect placidity on her face.  When she was spoken to, she smiled, but did not often speak.  The smile was meaningless and yet infinitely pathetic:  it was an infant’s smile on an aged face; the infant’s heart and infant’s brain had come back.  All the weariness, all the perplexity, all the sorrow, had gone from life, had slipped away from memory.  This state had come on so gradually that even Mercy hardly realized the extent of it.  The silent smile or the gentle, simple ejaculations with which her mother habitually replied meant more to her than they did to others.  She did not comprehend how little they really proved a full consciousness on her mother’s part; and she was unutterably shocked, when, on going to her bedside one morning, she found her unable to move, and evidently without clear recognition of any one’s face.  The end had begun; the paralysis which had so slowly been putting the mind to rest had prostrated the body also.  It was now only a question of length of siege, of how much vital force the system had hoarded up.  Lying helpless in bed, the poor old woman was as placid and gentle as before.  She never murmured nor even stirred impatiently.  She seemed unconscious of any weariness.  The only emotion she showed was when Mercy left the room; then she would cry silently till Mercy returned.  Her eyes followed Mercy constantly, as a little babe’s follow its mother; and she would not take a mouthful of food from any other hand.

It was the very hardest form of illness for Mercy to bear.  A violent and distressing disease, taxing her strength, her ingenuity to their utmost every moment, would have been comparatively nothing to her.  To sit day after day, night after night, gazing into the senseless yet appealing eyes of this motionless being, who had literally no needs except a helpless animal’s needs of food and drink; who clung to her with the irrational clinging of an infant, yet would never know even her name again,—­it was worse than the chaining of life to death.  As the days wore on, a species of terror took possession of Mercy.  It seemed to her that this silent watchful, motionless creature never had been her mother,—­never had been a human being like other human beings.  As the old face grew more and more haggard, and the old hands more and more skinny and claw-like, and the traces of intellect and thought more and more faded away from the features, the horror deepened, until Mercy feared that her own brain must be giving way.