"
In these days it seemed to her that all the anguish of her life had centred
in the single fear of losing her mother. At times she almost reproached
herself with loving Dan too much, and for months she would resolutely keep
her thoughts from following him, while she laid her impassioned service at
her mother's feet. Day or night there was hardly a moment when she was not
beside her, trying, by very force of love, to hold her back from the death
to which she went with her slow and stately tread.
For Mrs. Ambler, who had kept her strength for a year after the Governor's
death, seemed at last to be gently withdrawing from a place in which she
found herself a stranger. There was nothing to detain her now; she was too
heartsick to adapt herself to many changes; loss and approaching poverty
might be borne by one for whom the chief thing yet remained, but she had
seen this go, and so she waited, with her pensive smile, for the moment
when she too might follow. If Betty were not looking she would put her
untasted food aside; but the girl soon found this out, and watched her
every mouthful with imploring eyes.
"Oh, mamma, do it to please me," she entreated.
"Well, give it back, my dear," Mrs. Ambler answered, complaisant as always,
and when Betty triumphantly declared, "You feel better now--you know you
do, you dearest," she responded readily:--
"Much better, darling; give me some straw to plait--I have grown to like to
have my hands busy.
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