When I was smoothing her white hair into something like its usual order, one lock escaped my fingers and fell forward on her chest. She saw it and cried out: “They have cut it off, oh, curse them! curse them! Betty, do you see? It’s gone, and--” she paused, looking curiously at the thin, glittering strand of hair--“and, Betty, either I’ve gone mad or it’s quite white! Oh, Betty, I _can’t_ understand!”
And so, as Betty--some long-dead Betty from her past--I put the suffering woman back into her great skeleton of a bed, and smoothed her brow and wet her lips times uncountable, wondering at the heat in her dry, parchment-like skin, while I tried to decide what ought to be done in this emergency.
I felt that a doctor should be summoned, but I stood in absolute awe of her will, her commands, and I knew her fixed determination never to have a physician’s care. She held “she _could_ not die, no matter what her ailments, until she had ‘the sign,’ and that when ‘the sign’ had once been given no power on earth could keep her here.”
So I dared not summon proper help; my next thought had been, naturally enough, of Mrs. Bulkley, the only friend of the old days left to her, but as fate would have it, Mrs. Bulkley was absent from the city on business that would detain her two or three days. Had I not heard my friend Mary rejoicing the night before over the very “high Jinks” the boarders were hoping to enjoy during that absence?
Then indeed my spirits sank, and I could only sit there and watch over her until she became calmer, and then I thought I would slip out and tell my landlady and get her to advise me what to do. And so the hours passed slowly by, and I looked them in the face with young, impatient eyes, and never noted their dread solemnity. For all my anxiety for the woman who was “breakin’ fast,” I had no faintest suspicion that she was _already broken_--that each time the clock struck off the afternoon hours--the four, or five, or six--it was, for the ancient woman in her gaunt, old bed, the _last time_.
To know that we are doing a thing for the _last_ time lends a touching grace to even the commonest act; but I was blind with that black density of blindness that can come only upon the very young, and therefore the very ignorant, and I only waited for the chance to slip away and ask for help for her.