“Don’t you get in!  You can walk, you can walk.  Mind, he’s to have but a quarter, tell him.”  And, as Seth whipped up his horses and drove off, the words, “wolves, wolves, wolves,” were heard coming in muffled tones through the door.

“He’d never have gone, if you hadn’t come back,—­never,” said Mrs. Wheeler, as she turned to Mercy.  “I never can thank you enough.  It’ll save his life, getting him out of that garret.”

Mercy did not say, but she thought that it was too late.  A mortal sickness had fastened upon the old man; and so it proved.  When she went to his home the next day, he was in a high fever and delirious; and he lived only a few days.  He had intervals of partial consciousness, and in those he seemed to be much touched by the patient care which his two sons were giving to him.  He had always been a hard father; had compelled his sons very early to earn their own living, and had refused to give them money, which he could so easily have spared, to establish themselves in business.  Now, that it was too late, he repented.

“Good boys, good boys, good boys after all,” he would mutter to himself, as they bent over him, and nursed him tenderly in his helplessness.  “Might have left them more money, might have left them more.  Mistake, mistake!” Once he roused, and with great vehemence asked to have his lawyer sent for immediately.  But, when the lawyer came, the delirium had returned again:  it was too late; and the old man died without repairing the injustice he had done.  The last intelligible words he spoke were, “Mistake! mistake!”

And he had indeed made a mistake.  When his will was opened, it was found that the whole bulk of his large estate had been left to trustees, to be held as a fund for assisting poor young men to a certain amount of capital to go into business with,—­the very thing which he had never done for his own children.  The trust was burdened with such preposterous conditions, however, that it never could have amounted to any thing, even if the courts had not come to the rescue, and mercifully broken the will, dividing the property where it rightfully belonged, between the wife and children.

Early in February Mrs. Carr died.  It was more like a going to sleep than like a death.  She lay for two days in a dozing state, smiling whenever Mercy spoke to her, and making great efforts to swallow food whenever Mercy offered it to her.  At last she closed her eyes, turned her head on one side, as if for a sounder sleep, and never moved again.

However we may think we are longing for the release from suffering to come to one we love, when it does come, it is a blow, is a shock.  Hundreds of times Mercy had said to herself in the course of the winter, “Oh, if God would only take my mother to heaven!  Her death would be easier to bear than this.”  But now she would have called her back, if she could.  The silent house, the empty room, still more terrible the long empty hours in which nobody needed her help,