"Grandmother, please let me go _four_ times a day--" "No. I do not consider it best for either of you. You heard the doctor say that your mother must not be agitated, and you saw yourself, a while ago, that she did not seem to want you. I will tell Phoebe. Be a good, obedient child!--Bring me the bag yonder, and let's see if we can't find enough pink worsted for a doll's afghan." That had been two days ago. Hagar went, morning and evening, to her mother's room, and sometimes Maria knew her and held her hands and played with her hair, and sometimes she did not seem to know her and ignored her or talked to her as a stranger. Her grandmother told her to pray for her mother's recovery. She did not need the telling; she loved her mother, and her petitions were frequent. Sometimes she got down on her knees to make them; sometimes she just made them walking around. "O God, save my mother. For Jesus' sake. Amen."--"O God, let my mother get well. For Jesus' sake. Amen."--She had finished the pink afghan, and she had done the dusting and errands her grandmother appointed her. This morning they had let her arrange the flowers in the bowls and vases. She always liked to do that, and she had been happy for almost an hour--but then the feeling came back.... The bright pool on the library floor did not reach to the bookcases. They were all in the gold-dust powdered umber of the rest of the room. Hagar standing before one of them, first on a hassock, and then, for the upper shelves, on a chair, hunted something to read. "Ministering Children"--she had read it. "Stepping Heavenward"--she had read it. "Home Influence" and "Mother's Recompense"--she had read them. Mrs. Sherwood--she had read Mrs. Sherwood--many volumes of Mrs. Sherwood. In after life it was only by a violent effort that she dismissed, in favour of any other India, the spectre of Mrs. Sherwood's India. "Parent's Assistant and Moral Tales"--she knew Simple Susan and Rosamond and all of them by heart. "Rasselas"--she had read it. "Scottish Chiefs"--she had read it. The forms of Wallace and Helen and Murray and Edwin flitted through her mind--she half put out her hand to the book, then withdrew it. She wasn't at all happy, and she wanted novelty. Miss Mühlbach--"Prince Eugene and His Times"--"Napoleon and Marie Louise"--she had read those, too. "The Draytons and the Davenants"--she half thought she would read about Olive and Roger again, but at last she passed them by also. There wasn't anything on that shelf she wanted. She called it the blue and green and red shelf, because the books were bound in those colours. Miss Serena's name was in most of these volumes.