ase, which her
father tugged painfully into the house; Miss Bell followed him. She
heard his key turn in the lock while the doctor fastened his horse.

She saw the doctor, who was slightly lame, limp around to the buggy
after his horse was tied, and take out two cases. She hated him while
he did it. She felt intuitively that something terrible was to come
to her mother because of those cases. She watched the doctor limp up
the steps with positive malevolence. "If he is such a smart doctor,
why doesn't he cure himself?" she asked.

She heard steps on the stairs, then the murmur of voices, and the
sound of the door opening into her mother's room. A frightful sense
of isolation came over her. She realized that it was infinitely worse
to be left by herself outside, suffering, than outside happiness. She
tried again to pray, then she stopped. "It is no good praying," she
reflected, "God did not stop mother's pain. It was only stopped by
that stuff I smelled out in the entry." She could not reason back of
that; her terror and misery brought her up against a dead wall. It
seemed to her presently that she heard a faint cry from her mother's
room, then she was quite sure that she smelled that strange, sweet
smell even through her closed door. Then her father opened her door
abruptly, and a great whiff of it entered with him, like some ghost
of pain and death.

"The doctors have neither of them had any breakfast, and they can't
leave her," he said, with a jerk of his elbow, and speaking still
with that angry tone towards the unoffending child. "Can you make
coffee?"

"I don't know how."

"Good for nothing!" said her father, and shut the door with a subdued
bang.

Maria heard him going down-stairs, and presently she heard a rattle
in the kitchen, a part of which was under her room. She went out
herself and stole softly down the stairs. Her father, with an air of
angry helplessness, was emptying the coffee-pot into her mother's
nice sink. Maria stood trembling at his elbow. "I don't believe
that's where mother empties it," she ventured.

"It has got to be emptied somewhere," said her father, and his tone
sounded as if he swore. Maria shrank back. "They've got to have some
coffee, anyhow."

Maria's father carried the coffee-pot over to the stove, in which a
freshly kindled fire was burning, and set it on it, in the hottest
place. Maria stealthily moved it back while he was searching for the
coffee in the pantry. She did