To me this was as if my book must go out cold into the world (like all that may come after it from me), and my sister, who took more thought for others and less for herself than any other human being I have known, saw this, and by some means unfathomable to a man coaxed my mother into being once again the woman she had been.

On a day but three weeks before she died my father and I were called softly upstairs.

My mother was sitting bolt upright, as she loved to sit, in her old chair by the window, with a manuscript in her hands.

But she was looking about her without much understanding.

'Just to please him,' my sister whispered, and then in a low, trembling voice my mother began to read.