And then his mother was seized with the illness from which, so she said, she never recovered.

It is true that Doctor Parker, the Orham physician, declared that she had recovered, or might recover if she cared to.
Which of the pair was right does not really matter.

At all events Mrs.Winslow, whether she recovered or not, never walked abroad again.

She was "up and about," as they say in Orham, and did some housework, after a fashion, but she never again set foot across the granite doorstep of the Winslow cottage.

Probably the poor woman's mind was slightly affected; it is charitable to hope that it was.
It seems the only reasonable excuse for the oddity of her behavior during the last twenty years of her life, for her growing querulousness and selfishness and for the exacting slavery in which she kept her only son.
During those twenty years whatever ambition Jedidah Edgar Wilfred may once have had was thoroughly crushed.