This year the reverend mother was led to her seat between two nuns, who
sustained her feeble limbs. This year the meek knees, which had worn the
marble floor in long hours of prayer during eighty pious years, could no
longer bend. The meek head was bowed, the bloodless hands were lifted up in
supplication, but the fingers were wasted and stiffened, and there was pain
in every movement of the joints.
There was no actual malady, only the slow death in life called old age. All
the patient needed was rest and tender nursing. This last her great-niece
supplied, together with the gentlest companionship. No highly trained
nurse, the product of modern science, could have been more efficient than
the instinct of affection had made Angela. And then the patient's temper
was so amiable, her mind, undimmed after eighty-three years of life, was a
mirror of God. She thought of her fellow-creatures with a Divine charity;
she worshipped her Creator with an implicit faith. For her in many a waking
vision the heavens opened and the spirits of departed saints descended from
their abode in bliss to hold converse with her. Eighty years of her life
had been given to religious exercises and charitable deeds.
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