A brooding melancholy settled upon her feelings; and she often spent days in her chamber, refusing to see any one except members of her own family, and weeping if she were spoken to.
"You will die, Madeline.

You will kill yourself!" said her husband, repeating, one day, the form of speech so often used when he found his wife in these states of abandonment.

He spoke with more than his usual tenderness, for, to his unimaginative mind had come a quickly passing, but vivid realization, of what he would lose if she were taken from him.
"The loss will scarcely be felt," was her murmured answer.
"Your children will, at least, feel it," said Mr.Leslie, in a more captious and meaning tone than, upon reflection, he would have used.
He felt her words as expressing indifference for himself, and his quick retort involved, palpably, the same impression in regard to his wife.
Madeline answered not farther, but her husband's words were not forgotten--"My children will feel my loss." This thought became so present to her mind, that none other could, for a space, come into manifest perception.

The mother's heart began quickening into life a sense of the mother's duty.

Thus it was, when her oldest child--named for herself, and with as loving and dependent a nature--opened the chamber door, and coming up to her father, made some request that he did not approve.