In the nightmare of horror which his wife’s sudden sickness brought upon him, old Mr. Prentiss felt that he could bear everything except the sight and sound of his wife’s struggles for breath.  He hardly saw the neighbor women who filled the house, taking advantage of this opportunity to inspect the furniture with an eye to the auction which would follow the removal of the old people to the city.  He hardly heeded the doctor’s desperate attempts with all varieties of new-fangled scientific contrivances to stay the hand of death.  He hardly knew that his son had come, and in his competent, prosperous way was managing everything for him.  He sat in one corner of the sick-room, and agonized over the unconscious sick woman, fighting for every breath.

On the third day he was left alone with her, by some chance, and suddenly the dreadful, heaving gasp was still.  He sprang to the bedside, sick with apprehension, but his wife looked up at him with recognition in her eyes.  “This is the end, Nathaniel,” she said in so low a whisper that he laid his ear to her lips to hear.  “Don’t let anybody in till I’m gone.  I don’t want ’em to see how happy I look.”  Her face wore, indeed, an unearthly look of beatitude.

“Nathaniel,” she went on, “I hope there’s no life after this—­for me anyway.  I don’t think I ever had very much soul.  It was always enough for me to live in the valley with you.  When I go back into the ground I’ll be where I belong.  I ain’t fit for heaven, and, anyway, I’m tired.  We’ve lived hard, you and I, Nathaniel; we loved hard when we were young, and we’ve lived all our lives right out to the end.  Now I want to rest.”

The old man sat down heavily in a chair by the bed.  His lips quivered, but he said nothing.  His wife’s brief respite from pain had passed as suddenly as it came, and her huge frame began again to shake in the agony of straining breath.  She managed to speak between gasps.

“Don’t let a soul in here, Nathaniel.  I’ll be gone in a few minutes.  I don’t want ’em to see——­”

The old man stepped to the door and locked it.  As he came back, the sick woman motioned him to come closer.

“Natty, I thought I could keep it, but I never did have a secret from you, and I can’t die without telling you, if there is a heaven and hell——­Oh, Natty, I’ve done a wicked thing and I’m dying without repenting.  I’d do it again.  That time you went to Mrs. Warner’s with the pattern—­this cold I got that day I went out——­”

Her husband interrupted her.  For the first time in years he did not call her “mother,” but used the pet name of their courtship.  The long years of their parenthood had vanished.  They had gone back to the days when each had made up all the world to the other.  “I know, Matey,” he said.  “I met young Warner out in the road and give the pattern to him, and I come right back, and see you sitting out there.  I knew what ’twas for.”