helplessness with a devotion which was finally so motherly, that it was
like losing at once a parent and a child when he died, and she remained
with the habit of giving herself when there was no longer any one to
receive the sacrifice. He had married late, and in her thirty-first year he
was seventy-eight; but the disparity of their ages, increasing toward the
end through his infirmities, had not loosened for her the ties of custom
and affection that bound them; she had seen him grow more and more fitfully
cognisant of what they had been to each other since her mother's death,
while she grew the more tender and fond with him. People who came to
condole with her seemed not to understand this, or else they thought it
would help her to bear up if they treated her bereavement as a relief from
hopeless anxiety. They were all surprised when she told them she still
meant to go home.

"Why, my dear," said one old lady, who had been away from America twenty
years, "_this_ is home! You've lived in this apartment longer now
than the oldest inhabitant has lived in most American towns. What are you
talking about? Do you mean that you are going back to Washington?"

"Oh no. We were merely staying on in Washington from force of habit, after
father gave up practice. I think we shall go back to the old homestead,
where we used to spend our summers, ever since I can remember."

"And where is that?" the old lady asked, with the sharpness which people
believe must somehow be good for a broken spirit.

"It's in the interior of Massachusetts--you wouldn't know it: a place
called Hatboro'."

"No, I certainly shouldn't," said the old lady, with superiority. "Why