"My dear," it said, "I've lost Amelia--you'd think she would have stood
by her mother in her trouble, wouldn't you? But she hasn't been near me
since. It seems queer--perhaps after people break their hips they can't
'feel' anything else but their hips! Perhaps it breaks their
imaginations. Anyway, Amelia's dead, my dear. Sometimes I think mebbe
I'd ought to be, too--a lone little woman like me, without a chick or a
child. Old women with children can afford to tumble downstairs, but not
my kind of old women. John is real good. He wants me to stay here, but I
can't--I can't, I can't, my dear! I've got to be where I can limp out to
the old pump and the gate and the orchard, on my crutches--I've got to
see the old hills I was born in, and Old '61 marching past the house,
and the old neighbors--I've got to die at _home_, my dear. So John
can't keep me. I wish I was going to find you there. I keep thinking how
beautiful it would be. You'd be out to the gate waiting, the way
people's daughters wait for them. And mebbe you'd have the kettle all
hot and we'd have a cup of tea together just as if I was the mother and
you was--Amelia! All the way home I should be thinking about your being
there. It's queer, isn't it, you went limping in that gate first, and
now it's me? A good many things are queer, and some are kind of
desolate. I've decided, my dear, that daughters have to be the kind that
are born, to stay by a body in trouble. They have to be made of flesh
and blood, my dear--and Amelia wasn't!

"I've written this a little to a time, laying on my back. Mebbe you
won't ever read it. Mebbe I won't ever see you again, but you will
remember, my dear, that I've loved you ever since I took off your
stocking and saw your poor, sprained ankle. If the Lord would perform
a miracle for me, I'd ask for it to be the bringing of Amelia to life
and finding her you."