And then I began to be afraid of dying, and my heart would beat so I thought it would wear out.  But I didn’t tell anybody how I felt.  I was ashamed of being afraid, and I just told God, because I knew He could understand better than anybody else; and I asked Him please to hold on to me, I not being able to do much holding myself, and He held.  I know it, for I felt it.

You see, Mrs. Blamire—­she’s Miss Bray’s assistant—­was away; Miss Bray was busy getting ready to go when Mrs. Blamire came back; and Miss Jones was pickling and preserving.  I didn’t want to bother her, so I dragged on, and kept my feelings to myself.

The girls were awful good to me.  Real many have relations in Yorkburg, and if I’d eaten all the fruit they sent me I’d been a tutti-frutti; but I couldn’t eat it.  And then one day I began to talk so queer they were frightened, and told Miss Bray, and she sent for the doctor quick.  That afternoon they took me to the hospital, and the last thing I saw was little Josie White crying like her heart would break with her arms around a tree.

“Please don’t die, Mary Cary, please don’t die!” she kept saying over and over, and when they tried to make her go in she bawled worse than ever.  I tried to wave my hand.

“I’m not going to die, I’m coming back,” I said, and that’s all I remember.

I knew they put me in something and drove off, and then I was in a little white bed in a big room with a lot of other little beds in it; and after that I didn’t know I was living for three weeks.  But I talked just the same.  They told me I made speeches by the hour, and read books out loud, and recited poems that had never been printed.  But when I stopped and lay like the dead, just breathing, the girls say they heard there were no hopes, and a lot of them just cried and cried.  It was awful nice of them, and if they hadn’t cut my hair off I would have made a real pretty corpse.

The day I first saw Miss Katherine really good she was standing by my bed, holding my wrist in one hand and her watch in another, and I thought she was an angel and I was in heaven.  She was in white, and I took her little white cap for a crown, and I said: 

“Are you my Mother?”

She nodded and smiled, but she didn’t speak, and I asked again: 

“Are you my Mother?”

“Your right-now Mother,” she said, and she smiled so delicious I thought of course I was in heaven, and I spoke once more.

“Where’s God?”

Then she stooped down and kissed me.

“In your heart and mine,” she answered.  “But you mustn’t talk, not yet.  Shut your eyes, and I will sing you to sleep.”  And I shut them.  And I knew I was in heaven, for heaven isn’t a place; it’s a feeling, and I had it.

And that’s how I met Miss Katherine.

Her father and mother are dead, just like mine.  Her father was Judge Trent, and his father once owned half the houses in Yorkburg, but lost them some way, and what he didn’t lose Judge Trent did after the war.