‘Will you promise me,’ she said, ’to give it up and get help if you find it is trying you excessively?’

‘Yes,’ Emily replied, ’I will promise that.  But I know I shall be better for the occupation.’

‘And you will let me still come and see you frequently?’

‘I should miss you very much if you ceased to,’ was Emily’s answer.

Both felt that a difficulty had been surmounted, though they looked at it from different sides.

October passed, and the first half of November.  Mrs. Hood had not risen from her bed, and there seemed slight chance that she ever would; she was sinking into hopeless imbecility.  Emily’s task in that sick-room was one which a hospital nurse would have found it burdensome to support; she bore it without a sign of weariness or of failure in physical strength.  Incessant companionship with bodily disease was the least oppressive of her burdens; the state of her mother’s mind afflicted her far more.  Occasionally the invalid would appear in full possession of her intellect, and those were the hardest days; at such times she was incessantly querulous; hours long she lay and poured forth complaints and reproaches.  When she could speak no more for very weariness, she moaned and wept, till Emily also found it impossible to check the tears which came of the extremity of her compassion.  The girl was superhuman in her patience; never did she speak a word which was not of perfect gentleness; the bitterest misery seemed but to augment the tenderness of her devotion.  Scarcely was there an hour of the day or night that she could claim for herself; whilst it was daylight she tended the sufferer ceaselessly, and her bed was in the same room, so that it often happened that she lay down only to rise before she could sleep.  Her task was lighter when her mother’s mind strayed from the present; but even then Mrs. Hood talked constantly, and was irritated if Emily failed in attention.  The usual subject was her happiness in the days before her marriage; she would revive memories of her school, give long accounts of her pupils, even speak of proposals of marriage which she had had the pleasure of declining.  At no time did she refer to Hood’s death, but often enough she uttered lamentations over the hardships in which her marriage had resulted, and compared her lot with what it might have been if she had chosen this or that other man.  Emily was pained unspeakably by this revelation of her mother’s nature, for she knew that it was idle to explain such tendencies of thought as the effect of disease; it was, in truth, only the emphasising of the faults she had always found it so hard to bear with.  She could not understand the absence of a single note of affection or sorrow in all these utterances, and the fact was indeed strange, bearing in mind Mrs. Hood’s outburst of loving grief when her husband was brought home, and the devotedness she had shown throughout Emily’s illness.  Were the selfish habits of years too strong for those better instincts which had never found indulgence till stirred by the supreme shock?  Thinking over the problem in infinite sadness, this was the interpretation with which Emily had to satisfy herself, and she saw in it the most dreadful punishment which a life-long fault could have entailed.