vast for a soul like her father’s, which had always been so like the soul of a child, to find her mother in.  Then she got some comfort from the memory of her mother, of her great strength.  It seemed to her that her mother, wherever she was, would not let her father wander alone very long.  That she would meet him with that love and chiding which is sometimes the very concert-pitch of love itself, its key-note, and lead him into those green pastures and beside those still waters of the Psalmist.  Maria, at that moment, got more comfort from her memory of the masterliness of her mother, whom she had known, than from her conception of God, towards whom her soul reached out, it is true, but whom it no more comprehended than a flower comprehends the sun.  The very love of God needs a human trellis whereby His creatures can reach Him, and Maria now climbed towards a trust in Him, by the reflection of her mother’s love, and strength in spite of love.

Then racking pity for herself and her own loss, and rage because of it, and a pity for her father which almost roused her to a fury of rebellion, again swept away every other consideration.

“Poor father! poor father!” she sobbed, under her breath.  “There he is going to die, and he hasn’t got mother to take care of him! She won’t do anything.  She will try not to smile, that is all.  And I can’t do anything, the way mother could.  Father don’t want me to even act as if I knew it; but if mother were alive he would tell her, and she would help him.”  Then Maria thought of herself, poor, solitary, female thing travelling the world alone, for she never thought, at that time, of her marriage being anything which would ever be a marriage in reality, but as of something which cast her outside the pale of possibilities and made her more solitary still, and she wept silently, or as silently as she could; once in awhile a murmur of agony or a sob escaped her.  She could not help it.  She got up out of her little chair and flung herself on the floor, and fairly writhed with the pain of her awful grief and sense of loss.  She became deaf to any sound; all her senses seemed to have failed her.  She was alive only to that sense of grief which is the primeval sense of the world—­the grief of existence itself and the necessity of death and loss.

All at once she felt a little, soft touch, and another little, weeping, human thing, born like herself to all the awful chances of love and grief, flung itself down beside her.

Maria had locked her doors, but she had forgotten her window, which opened on an upper balcony, and was easily accessible to any one climbing out of the hall window.  Evelyn had been listening at her door and had heard her sobs.  Knowing from experience that her sister meant what she said, she had climbed out of the hall window, scudded along the little balcony, and into Maria’s window.  She flung herself down on the floor, and wept so violently that Maria was alarmed.