twenty-five dollars a week, and that her father would not have called her in except in an extreme case. She watched her father help out the woman, who was stout and middle-aged, and much larger than he. Miss Bell had a dress-suit case, 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 not know much, but she did know that an empty coffee-pot on such a hot place would come to ruin.
Her father emerged from the pantry with a tin-canister in his hand. “I've sent a telegram to our aunt Maria for her to come right on,” said he, “but she can't get here before afternoon. I don't suppose you know how much coffee your mother puts in. I don't suppose you know about anything.”
Maria realized dimly that she was a scape-goat, but there was such terrible suffering in her father's face that she had no impulse to rebel. She smelled of the canister which her father held out towards her with a nervously trembling hand. “Why, father, this is tea; it isn't coffee,” said she.
“Well, if you don't know anything that a big girl like you ought to know, I should think you might know enough not to try to make coffee with tea,” said her father.
Maria looked at her father in a bewildered sort of way. “I guess the coffee is in the other canister,” said she, meekly.
“Why didn't you say so then?” demanded her father.
Maria was silent. It seemed to her that her father had gone mad. Harry Edgham made a ferocious stride across the kitchen to the pantry. Maria followed him. “I guess that is the coffee canister,” said she, pointing.
“Why didn't you say so, then?” asked her father, viciously, and again Maria made no reply. Her father seized the coffee canister and approached the stove. “I don't suppose you know how much she puts in. I don't suppose you know anything,” said he.
“I guess she puts in about a cupful,” said Maria, trembling.
“A cupful! with coffee at the price it is now? I guess she doesn't,” said her father. He poured the coffee-pot full of boiling water from the tea-kettle, then he tipped the coffee canister into his hand, and put one small pinch into the pot.
“Oh, father,” ventured Maria. “I don't believe—”
“You don't believe what?”
“I don't believe that is enough.”
“Of course it's enough. Don't you suppose your father knows how to make coffee?”
Her father set the coffee-pot on the stove, where it immediately began to boil. Then he carried back the canister into the pantry, and returned with a panful of eggs. “You can set the table, I suppose, anyhow?” said he. “You know enough to do as much as that?”
“Yes, I can do that,” replied Maria, with alacrity, and indeed she could. Her mother had exacted some small household tasks from her, and setting the table was one of them. She hurried into the dining-room and began setting the table with the pretty blue-flowered ware that her mother had been so proud of. She seemed to feel tears in her heart when she laid the plates, but none sprang to her eyes. Somehow, handling these familiar inanimate things was the acutest torture. Presently she smelled eggs burning. She realized that her father was burning up the eggs, in his utter ignorance of cookery. She thought privately that she didn't believe but she could cook the eggs, but she dared not go out in the kitchen. Her father, in his anxiety, had actually reached ferocity. He had always petted her, in his easy-going fashion, now he terrified her. She dared not go out there.
All at once, as she was getting the clean napkins from the sideboard, she heard the front door open, and one of the neighbors, Mrs. Jonas White, entered without knocking. She was a large woman and carelessly dressed, but her great face was beaming with kindness and pity.
“I just heard how bad your ma was,” she said, in a loud whisper, “an' I run right over. I thought mebbe—How is she?”
“She is very sick,” replied Maria. She felt at first an impulse to burst into tears before this broadside of sympathy, then she felt stiff.
“You are as white as a sheet,” said Mrs. White. “Who is burnin' eggs out there?” She pointed to the kitchen.
“Father.”
“Lord! Who's up-stairs?”
“Miss Bell and the doctors. They've sent for Aunt Maria, but she can't come before afternoon.”
Mrs. White fastened a button on her waist. “Well, I'll stay till then,” said she. “Lillian can get along all right.” Lillian was Mrs. White's eighteen-year-old daughter.
Mrs. White opened the kitchen door. “How is she?” she said in a hushed voice to Harry Edgham, frantically stirring the burned eggs, which sent up a monstrous smoke and smell. As she spoke, she went over to him, took the frying-pan out of his hands, and carried it over to the sink.
“She is a very sick woman,” replied Harry Edgham, looking at Mrs. White with a measure of gratitude.
“You've got Dr. Williams and Miss Bell, Maria says?”
“Yes.”
“Maria says her aunt is coming?”
“Yes, I sent a telegram.”
“Well, I'll stay till she gets here,” said Mrs. White, and again that expression of almost childish gratitude came over the man's face. Mrs. White began scraping the burned eggs off the pan.
“They haven't had any breakfast,” said Harry, looking upward.
“And they don't dare leave her?”
“No.”
“Well,