Again she felt affrighted at their loneliness, which once hardly gave her a thought.  All was well enough when people were in health and merry, and one had no need of help; but with trouble or sickness the woods around seemed to shut them cruelly away from all succour—­the woods where horses sink to the chest in snow, where storms smother one in mid-April.

The mother strove to turn in her sleep, waked with a cry of anguish, and the continual moaning began anew.  Maria rose and sat by the bed, thinking of the long day just beginning in which she would have neither help nor counsel.

All the dragging hours were burdened with lamentable sound; the groaning from the bed where the sick woman lay never ceased, and haunted the narrow wooden dwelling.  Now and then some household noise broke in upon it:  the clashing of plates, the clang of the opened stove door, the sound of feet on the planking, Tit’Be stealing into the house, clumsy and anxious, to ask for news.

“Is she no better?”

Maria answered by a movement of the head.  They both stood gazing for a time at the motionless figure under the woollen blankets, giving ear to the sounds of distress; then Tit’Be departed to his small outdoor duties.  When Maria had put the house in order she took up her patient watching, and the sick woman’s agonizing wails seemed to reproach her.

From hour to hour she kept reckoning the times and the distances.  “My father should not be far from St. Coeur de Marie ...  If the doctor is there they will rest the horse for a couple of hours and come back together.  But the roads must be very bad; at this time, in the spring, they are sometimes hardly passable.”

And then a little later:—­” They should have left; perhaps in going through La Pipe they will stop to speak to the cure; perhaps again he may have started as soon as he heard, without waiting for them.  In that case he might be here at any moment.”

But the fall of night brought no one, and it was only about seven o’clock that the sound of sleigh-bells was heard, and her father and the doctor arrived.  The latter came into the house alone, put his bag on the table and began to pull off his overcoat, grumbling all the while.

“With the roads in this condition,” said he, “it is no small affair to get about and visit the sick.  And as for you folk, you seem to have hidden yourselves as far in the woods as you could.  Great Heavens!  You might very well all die without a soul coming to help you.”

After warming himself for a little while at the stove he approached the bedside.  “Well, good mother, so we have taken the notion to be sick, just like people who have money to spend on such things!”

But after a brief examination he ceased to jest, saying:—­“She really is sick, I do believe.”