My Father was in the habit of saying, in later years, that no small element in his wedded happiness had been the fact that my Mother and he were of one mind in the interpretation of Sacred Prophecy.  Looking back, it appears to me that this unusual mental exercise was almost their only relaxation, and that in their economy it took the place which is taken, in profaner families, by cards or the piano.  It was a distraction; it took them completely out of themselves.  During those melancholy weeks at Pimlico, I read aloud another work of the same nature as those of Habershon and Jukes, the Horae Apocalypticae of a Mr. Elliott.  This was written, I think, in a less disagreeable style, and certainly it was less opaquely obscure to me.  My recollection distinctly is that when my Mother could endure nothing else, the arguments of this book took her thoughts away from her pain and lifted her spirits.  Elliott saw ‘the queenly arrogance of Popery’ everywhere, and believed that the very last days of Babylon the Great were came.  Lest I say what may be thought extravagant, let me quote what my Father wrote in his diary at the time of my Mother’s death.  He said that the thought that Rome was doomed (as seemed not impossible in 1857) so affected my Mother that it ‘irradiated’ her dying hours with an assurance that was like ’the light of the Morning Star, the harbinger of the rising sun’.

After our return to Islington, there was a complete change in my relation to my Mother.  At Pimlico, I had been all-important, her only companion, her friend, her confidant.  But now that she was at home again, people and things combined to separate me from her.  Now, and for the first time in my life, I no longer slept in her room, no longer sank to sleep under her kiss, no longer saw her mild eyes smile on me with the earliest sunshine.  Twice a day, after breakfast and before I went to rest, I was brought to her bedside; but we were never alone; other people, sometimes strange people, were there.  We had no cosy talk; often she was too weak to do more than pat my hand; her loud and almost constant cough terrified and harassed me.  I felt, as I stood, awkwardly and shyly, by her high bed, that I had shrunken into a very small and insignificant figure, that she was floating out of my reach, that all things, but I knew not what nor how, were corning to an end.  She herself was not herself; her head, that used to be held so erect, now rolled or sank upon the pillow; the sparkle was all extinguished from those bright, dear eyes.  I could not understand it; I meditated long, long upon it all in my infantile darkness, in the garret, or in the little slip of a cold room where my bed was now placed; and a great, blind anger against I knew not what awakened in my soul.