ul 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 besi