Yet she lingered with us six weeks more, and during this time I again relapsed, very naturally, into solitude.  She now had the care of a practised woman, one of the ‘saints’ from the Chapel, and I was only permitted to pay brief visits to her bedside.  That I might not be kept indoors all day and everyday, a man, also connected with the meeting-house, was paid a trifle to take me out for a walk each morning.  This person, who was by turns familiar and truculent, was the object of my intense dislike.  Our relations became, in the truest sense, ‘forced’; I was obliged to walk by his side, but I held that I had no further responsibility to be agreeable, and after a while I ceased to speak to him, or to answer his remarks.  On one occasion, poor dreary man, he met a friend and stopped to chat with him.  I considered this act to have dissolved the bond; I skipped lightly from his side, examined several shop-windows which I had been forbidden to look into, made several darts down courts and up passages, and finally, after a delightful morning, returned home, having known my directions perfectly.  My official conductor, in a shocking condition of fear, was crouching by the area-rails looking up and down the street.  He darted upon me, in a great rage, to know ‘what I meant by it?’ I drew myself up as tall as I could, hissed ‘Blind leader of the blind!’ at him, and, with this inappropriate but very effective Parthian shot, slipped into the house.

When it was quite certain that no alleviations and no medical care could prevent, or even any longer postpone the departure of my Mother, I believe that my future conduct became the object of her greatest and her most painful solicitude.  She said to my Father that the worst trial of her faith came from the feeling that she was called upon to leave that child whom she had so carefully trained from his earliest infancy for the peculiar service of the Lord, without any knowledge of what his further course would be.  In many conversations, she most tenderly and closely urged my Father, who, however, needed no urging, to watch with unceasing care over my spiritual welfare.  As she grew nearer her end, it was observed that she became calmer, and less troubled by fears about me.  The intensity of her prayers and hopes seemed to have a prevailing force; it would have been a sin to doubt that such supplications, such confidence and devotion, such an emphasis of will, should not be rewarded by an answer from above in the affirmative.  She was able, she said, to leave me ‘in the hands of her loving Lord’, or, on another occasion, ‘to the care of her covenant God’.