o madness with anxiety. "Slip on something so you won't
catch cold," said he, in his irritated voice. "I don't want another
one down."

Maria ran to her closet and pulled out a little pink wrapper. "Oh,
father, is mother very sick?" she whispered again.

"Yes, she is very sick. I am going to have another doctor to-morrow,"
replied her father, still in that furious, excited voice, which the
sick woman must have heard.

"What shall I--" began Maria, but her father, running down the
stairs, cut her short.

"Do nothing," said he. "Just go in there and stay with her. And don't
you talk. Don't you speak a word to her. Go right in." With that the
front door slammed.

Maria went tiptoeing into her mother's room, still shaking from head
to foot, and her blue eyes seeming to protrude from her little white
face. Even before she entered her mother's room she became conscious
of a noise, something between a wail and a groan. It was
indescribably terrifying. It was like nothing which she had ever
heard before. It did not seem possible that her mother, that anything
human, in fact, was making such a noise, and yet no animal could have
made it, for it was articulate. Her mother was in fact both praying
and repeating verses of Scripture, in that awful voice which was no
longer capable of normal speech, but was compounded of wail and
groan. Every sentence seemed to begin with a groan, and ended with a
long-drawn-out wail. Maria went close to her mother's bed and stood
looking at her. Her poor little face would have torn her mother's
heart with its piteous terror, had she herself not been in such agony.

Maria did not speak. She remembered what her father had said. As her
mother lay there, stretched out stiff and stark, almost as if she
were dead, Maria glanced around the room as if for help. She caught
sight of a bottle of cologne on the dresser, one which she had given
her mother herself the Christmas before; she had bought it out of her
little savings of pocket-money. Maria went unsteadily over to the
dresser and got the cologne. She also opened a drawer and got out a
clean handkerchief. She became conscious that her mother's eyes were
upon her, even although she never ceased for a moment her cries of
agony.

"What--r you do--g?" asked her mother, in her dreadful voice.

"Just getting some cologne to put on your head, to make you feel
better, mother," replied Maria, piteously. She thought she must
answer her mother's questio