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I nodded assent, and Mrs. Todd spoke still lower.

“I set there close by the bed; I’d been through a good deal for some days back, and I thought I might ‘s well be droppin’ asleep too, bein’ a quick person to wake. She looked to me as if she might last a day longer, certain, now she’d got more comfortable, but I was real tired, an’ sort o’ cramped as watchers will get, an’ a fretful feeling begun to creep over me such as they often do have. If you give way, there ain’t no support for the sick person; they can’t count on no composure o’ their own. Mis’ Tolland moved then, a little restless, an’ I forgot me quick enough, an’ begun to hum out a little part of a hymn tune just to make her feel everything was as usual an’ not wake up into a poor uncertainty. All of a sudden she set right up in bed with her eyes wide open, an’ I stood an’ put my arm behind her; she hadn’t moved like that for days. And she reached out both her arms toward the door, an’ I looked the way she was lookin’, an’ I see some one was standin’ there against the dark. No, ‘twa’n’t Mis’ Begg; ’twas somebody a good deal shorter than Mis’ Begg. The lamplight struck across the room between us. I couldn’t tell the shape, but ’twas a woman’s dark face lookin’ right at us; ‘twa’n’t but an instant I could see. I felt dreadful cold, and my head begun to swim; I thought the light went out; ‘twa’n’t but an instant, as I say, an’ when my sight come back I couldn’t see nothing there. I was one that didn’t know what it was to faint away, no matter what happened; time was I felt above it in others, but ’twas somethin’ that made poor human natur’ quail. I saw very plain while I could see; ’twas a pleasant enough face, shaped somethin’ like Mis’ Tolland’s, and a kind of expectin’ look.

“No, I don’t expect I was asleep,” Mrs. Todd assured me quietly, after a moment’s pause, though I had not spoken. She gave a heavy sigh before she went on. I could see that the recollection moved her in the deepest way.

“I suppose if I hadn’t been so spent an’ quavery with long watchin’, I might have kept my head an’ observed much better,” she added humbly; “but I see all I could bear. I did try to act calm, an’ I laid Mis’ Tolland down on her pillow, an’ I was a-shakin’ as I done it. All she did was to look up to me so satisfied and sort o’ questioning, an I looked back to her.

“‘You saw her, didn’t you?’ she says to me, speakin’ perfectly reasonable.”Tis my mother,’ she says again, very feeble, but lookin’ straight up at me, kind of surprised with the pleasure, and smiling as if she saw I was overcome, an’ would have said more if she could, but we had hold of hands. I see then her change was comin’, but I didn’t call Mis’ Begg, nor make no uproar. I felt calm then, an’ lifted to somethin’ different as I never was since. She opened her eyes just as she was goin’ —

“‘You saw her, didn’t you?’ she said the second time, an’ I says, ‘Yes, dear, I did; you ain’t never goin’ to feel strange an’ lonesome no more.’ An’ then in a few quiet minutes ’twas all over. I felt they’d gone away together. No, I wa’n’t alarmed afterward; ’twas just that one moment I couldn’t live under, but I never called it beyond reason I should see the other watcher. I saw plain enough there was somebody there with me in the room.