She saw the doctor, who was slightly lame, limp around to the buggy after his horse was tied, and take out two cases. She hated him while he did it. She felt intuitively that something terrible was to come to her mother because of those cases. She watched the doctor limp up the steps with positive malevolence. "If he is such a smart doctor, why doesn't he cure himself?" she asked. She heard steps on the stairs, then the murmur of voices, and the sound of the door opening into her mother's room. A frightful sense of isolation came over her. She realized that it was infinitely worse to be left by herself outside, suffering, than outside happiness. She tried again to pray, then she stopped. "It is no good praying," she reflected, "God did not stop mother's pain. It was only stopped by that stuff I smelled out in the entry." She could not reason back of that; her terror and misery brought her up against a dead wall. It seemed to her presently that she heard a faint cry from her mother's room, then she was quite sure that she smelled that strange, sweet smell even through her closed door. Then her father opened her door abruptly, and a great whiff of it entered with him, like some ghost of pain and death. "The doctors have neither of them had any breakfast, and they can't leave her," he said, with a jerk of his elbow, and speaking still with that angry tone towards the unoffending child. "Can you make coffee?" "I don't know how." "Good for nothing!" said her father, and shut the door with a subdued bang. Maria heard him going down-stairs, and presently she heard a rattle in the kitchen, a part of which was under her room. She went out herself and stole softly down the stairs. Her father, with an air of angry helplessness, was emptying the coffee-pot into her mother's nice sink. Maria stood trembling at his elbow. "I don't believe that's where mother empties it," she ventured. "It has got to be emptied somewhere," said her father, and his tone sounded as if he swore. Maria shrank back. "They've got to have some coffee, anyhow." Maria's father carried the coffee-pot over to the stove, in which a freshly kindled fire was burning, and set it on it, in the hottest place. Maria stealthily moved it back while he was searching for the coffee in the pantry. She did not know much, but she did know that an empty coffee-pot on such a hot place would come to ruin. Her father emerged from the pantry with a tin-canister in his hand. "I've sent a telegram to our aunt Maria for her to come right on," said he, "but she can't get here before afternoon. I don't suppose you know how much coffee your mother puts in. I don't suppose you know about anything." Maria realized dimly that she was a scape-goat, but there was such terrible suffering in her father's face that she had no impulse to rebel. She smelled of the canister which her father held out towards her with a nervously trembling hand. "Why, father, this is tea; it isn't coffee," said she.