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 question in spite of her father’s prohibition.

Her mother seemed to take no further notice; she turned her face to the wall.  “Have—­mercy upon me, O Lord, according to Thy loving kindness, according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies,” she shrieked out.  Then the words ended with a long-drawn-out “Oh—­oh—­”

Had Maria not been familiar with the words, she could not have understood them.  Not a consonant was fairly sounded, the vowels were elided.  She went, feeling as if her legs were sticks, close to her mother’s bed, and opened the cologne bottle with hands which shook like an old man’s with the palsy.  She poured some cologne on the handkerchief and a pungent odor filled the room.  She laid the wet handkerchief on her mother’s sallow forehead, then she recoiled, for her mother, at the shock of the coldness, experienced a new and almost insufferable spasm of pain.  “Let—­me alone!” she wailed, and it was like the howl of a dog.

Maria slunk back to the dresser with the handkerchief and the cologne bottle, then she returned to her mother’s bedside and seated herself there in a rocking-chair.  A lamp was burning over on the dresser, but it was turned low; her mother’s convulsed face seemed to waver in unaccountable shadows.  Maria sat, not speaking a word, but quivering from head to foot, and her mother kept up her prayers and her verses from Scripture.  Maria herself began to pray in her heart.  She said it over and over to herself, in unutterable appeal and terror, “O Lord, please make mother well, please make her well.”  She prayed on, although the groaning wail never ceased.

Suddenly her mother turned and looked at her, and spoke quite naturally.  “Is that you?” she said.

“Yes, mother.  I’m so sorry you are sick.  Father has gone for the doctor.”

“You haven’t got on enough,” said her mother, still in her natural voice.

“I’ve got on my wrapper.”

“That isn’t enough, getting up right out of bed so.  Go and get my white crocheted shawl out of the closet and put it over your shoulders.”

Maria obeyed.  While she was doing so her mother resumed her cries.  She said the first half of the twenty-third psalm, then she looked again at Maria seating herself beside her, and said, in her own voice, wrested as it were by love from the very depths of mortal agony.  “Have you got your stockings on?” said she.