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.
"Yes, ma'am, and my slippers." Her mother said no more to her.

She resumed her attention to her own misery with an odd, small gesture of despair.

The cries never ceased.
Maria still prayed.

It seemed to her that her father would never return with the doctor.