● ● ●  stopped.¹⁶⁸ The important business again appears to have been of an amorous nature.

On July 29 Mrs. Patterson wrote Quimby a distraught and anguished letter. She had just received word that George Glover was dying of consumption of the bowels in Enterprise, Minnesota. Though sick herself and without means or knowledge of how to reach the boy, she would start out next Monday to go to him, but almost incoherently she implored Quimby to save him by his power.¹⁶⁹

The report she had received may have been false or exaggerated and she may have learned this in time. At any rate, Glover did not die and she did not leave for Minnesota.

The next we know of her she was in Quimby’s home town, Belfast, writing on September 7 to her sister Martha Pilsbury. In a deeply exasperated letter she returned ten dollars which Martha had sent to help her in her “want” and spiritedly reproached her for an unspecified indignity to which she felt her sister had just put her.¹⁷⁰ It is apparent that there was already a widening rift between Mrs. Patterson and her family.

A month later, on October 6, Mark Baker died at Sanbornton. The stern, rather lonely old man, who had loomed over her childhood like a granite peak, left to each of his three daughters the sum of one dollar. The bulk of his not inconsiderable estate went to his widow and at her decease to his son George, who had given him a grandson to carry on the Baker name. The daughter whom he had anxiously rocked in his arms was thus left to the dubious mercies of a Calvinist Deity whose favors were as unpredictable and arbitrary as Mark’s own.

Nine days later the Lynn Weekly Reporter announced that “Dr. D. Patterson has returned to Lynn, and will be happy to greet his friends and patrons at his office.”¹⁷¹ Wearily Mrs. Patterson took up the shattered remnants of her marriage and attempted to put them together again.