Again, she would be so wrought upon by the steady agony of those fixed eyes that she would leave him abruptly to hide herself and shudder, tearless, at the utter misery and hopelessness of it all.

She wondered at her mother's calm until she noticed, after a few weeks, how the face was withering with that shriveling which comes from within when a living thing is dying at the core.
She read the Bible to him, selecting consolatory passage with the aid of a concordance, in the evenings after he had been lifted into bed for the night.

She was filled with protest as she read; for it seemed to her that this good man, her best of fathers, thus savagely and causelessly stricken, was proof before her eyes that the sentences executed against men were not divine, but the devilish emanations of brute chance.

"There may be a devil," she said to herself, frightened at her own blasphemy, "but there certainly is no God." Again, the Bible's promises, so confident, so lofty, so marvelously responsive to the longings and cravings of every kind of desolation and woe, had a soothing effect upon her; and they helped to put her in the frame of mind to find for conversation--or, rather, for her monologues to him--subjects which her instinct told her would be welcome visitors in that prison.
She talked to him of how he was loved, of how noble his influence had been in their lives.

She analyzed him to himself, saying things she would never have dared say had there been the slightest chance of so much response as the flutter of an eyelid.