I beg your pardon for being a bore to one I so deeply love and admire, to whom I owe days and days of forgetfulness of self and troubles, and the intensest of all joys-hero-worship!  People don’t always realize what a happiness that is!  God bless you for every beautiful thought you poured into my tired heart, and for every smile on a weary way.  Carmen Sylva.

This was the occasion mentioned by Howells when Mrs. Clemens made tea for them in the parlor for the last time.  Her social life may be said to have ended that afternoon.  Next morning the break came.  Clemens, in his notebook for that day, writes: 

Tuesday, August 12, 1902.  At 7 A.M.  Livy taken violently ill.  Telephoned and Dr. Lambert was here in 1/2 hour.  She could not breathe-was likely to stifle.  Also she had severe palpitation.  She believed she was dying.  I also believed it.

Nurses were summoned, and Mrs. Crane and others came from Elmira.  Clara Clemens took charge of the household and matters generally, and the patient was secluded and guarded from every disturbing influence.  Clemens slipped about with warnings of silence.  A visitor found notices in Mark Twain’s writing pinned to the trees near Mrs. Clemens’s window warning the birds not to sing too loudly.

The patient rallied, but she remained very much debilitated.  On September 3d the note-book says: 

    Always Mr. Rogers keeps his yacht Kanawha in commission & ready to
    fly here and take us to Riverdale on telegraphic notice.

But Mrs. Clemens was unable to return by sea.  When it was decided at last, in October, that she could be removed to Riverdale, Clemens and Howells went to Boston and engaged an invalid car to make the journey from York Harbor to Riverdale without change.  Howells tells us that Clemens gave his strictest personal attention to the arrangement of these details, and that they absorbed him.

There was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master . . . .  With the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegate more and more things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate the least detail.

They made the journey on the 16th, in nine and a half hours.  With the exception of the natural weariness due to such a trip, the invalid was apparently no worse on their arrival.  The stout English butler carried her to her room.  It would be many months before she would leave it again.  In one of his memoranda Clemens wrote: 

    Our dear prisoner is where she is through overwork-day & night
    devotion to the children & me.  We did not know how to value it.  We
    know now.

And in a notation, on a letter praising him for what he had done for the world’s enjoyment, and for his splendid triumph over debt, he said: 

    Livy never gets her share of these applauses, but it is because the
    people do not know.  Yet she is entitled to the lion’s share.