Towards night my mother became a little feverish, and she sent me away. I
did not, however, go to my own room, but lay down in the next room on
the sofa. Every quarter of an hour I got up, went on tiptoe to the door,
listened.... Everything was still--but my mother hardly slept that night.
When I went in to her early in the morning, her face looked hollow, her
eyes shone with an unnatural brightness. In the course of the day she got
a little better, but towards evening the feverishness increased again. Up
till then she had been obstinately silent, but all of a sudden she began
talking in a hurried broken voice. She was not wandering, there was a
meaning in her words--but no sort of connection. Just upon midnight, she
suddenly, with a convulsive movement raised herself in bed--I was sitting
beside her--and in the same hurried voice, continually taking sips of
water, from a glass beside her, feebly gesticulating with her hands,
and never once looking at me, she began to tell her story.... She would
stop, make an effort to control herself and go on again.... It was all so
strange, just as though she were doing it all in a dream, as though she
herself were absent, and some one else were speaking by her lips, or
forcing her to speak.