is swallowed up in the black darkness! Oh, the awful presentiment which suddenly approached like a spectre out of the leaden clouds, that filled the whole vista before her eyes with grey terrors; the presentiment that this trouble, the greatest of all, was going to strike her most, now, in her old, old age, when she no longer had the strength to endure it, when she would sink under the weight of it! . . . O God, why should it now, why now, fall with such pitiless, crushing weight? Why now? Was it not enough that one of her children . . . had gone mad, surely the most terrible thing that can happen? Was not that enough? What more could be threatening, looming before her, now that she was growing so feeble? See, did not her old hands tremble at the mere thought, was not her whole helpless body shaking, were not the tears flowing until they smarted in the furrows of her wrinkles and until her handkerchief was just a wet rag? What more could there be coming?
"O God, no more, no more!" she prayed, automatically, believing, in her feeble despair, in the great, infinite Omnipotence which is so very, very far removed from us . . . and which she had always worshipped decently, once a week, in church . . . formerly . . . when she still went out. "O God, no more, no more!"
It was greater, the infinite Omnipotence, than what they worshipped in church; it filled everything
