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xiv
MEMOIR

able to exercise any influence over her, it was to determine her work in that direction.

So the months passed on. Her father's death, after a few days' illness in January of the present year, gave a great shock to a constitution which had never been strong. For some weeks her visits to us became infrequent. On leaving town for the Easter holidays of the present year, I received from her a small memorial gift, with a few words of what seemed only a kind greeting for the season. When I returned, it was to learn that those few words were to be the last ; that the gift had been sent with the consciousness that it might be in very deed in memory of one who had passed away. She had had to make the choice, so often forced upon sufferers, between the certainty of long lingering agony and the possibility of deliverance from it, accompanied by the risk of a more immediate close. Acting on the counsel of friends and medical advisers, she embraced the latter alternative, with apparently a foreboding clear to herself, though not disclosed to others, of what the end would be. And so that end came; and she slept and was at rest. With this presentiment, as of one who saw the shadows deepening round her, not without sadness, but altogether without fear or murmur, and with a heart that thought even then of others rather than herself, she