Nobody's Rose

by Adele E. Thompson

Out of the door of the cabinet a white, shadowy little figure had lightly floated.—Page [32].

But evidence enough remained: the cabinet, that through a sliding panel opened into an adjoining room, the guitar, the wigs, the costumes of the different “materializations.”

A storm of indignation naturally followed these discoveries, a storm so loud as to arouse the attention of all in the vicinity, and to bring a policeman to the scene. An angry but fruitless search was made for the clairvoyant, who was near enough to hear the threats expressed as she cowered in her place of retreat.

A much duller comprehension than hers would have realized that her career in that city was ended. Reporters, as she well knew, would catch it up, and the morning papers spread the news of her exposure far and wide, even should she escape the arrest she had heard threatened on the ugly charge of obtaining money under false pretenses. While the crowd was still surging through her rooms, she had decided that the sooner she was away the better; and as soon as the neighborhood regaining quiet had sunk into slumber, she secured, as hastily and secretly as possible, the removal of her few personal effects, and, thanks to the express speed of the railroad, was many miles distant when morning dawned.

Angry though she was at Posey, the innocent cause of the trouble, yet had the latter been at hand she would have taken her in her flight. But Posey up in the attic, to which she had fled and from which she had not dared to venture, had fallen asleep on a soft heap of rubbish, and Madam Atheldena Sharpe, now as ever thoroughly selfish, abandoned with hardly a thought the child who had so long shared her fortunes. And when with the morning Posey, waking, crept cautiously down, her tumbled finery looking tawdry enough in the daylight, it was to find only empty, disordered rooms, from which the clairvoyant and all belonging to her had vanished.

So for the second time, and with an increased keenness of apprehension of all it implied, Posey was again thrown on the world. And now, for the first time, in the person of the fat, good-natured policeman, Society, that great factor of civilization, became aware of her existence, took her under its charge, and in due time placed her in the “Children’s Refuge,” an institution where the city was already providing for some two or three hundred similar waifs and strays.

This was a new, strange home indeed, and at the same time a statelier one than she had ever known—the tall brick building, with its great wings, one the boys’ and the other the girls’ department, stretching on either side. While accustomed as she had been all her life to a haphazard, makeshift existence, the exquisite neatness, the perfect order, and the regular system at first equally amazed and depressed. Posey had brought with her a somewhat varied store of accomplishments, but as she looked at the long rows of girls, with their neat uniforms of blue dresses and checked aprons, and noticed the clock-work regularity of their daily life she felt that she had much, very much, to learn.

The Refuge was not an institution where appalling cruelties are hidden under the surface of smoothness. The children were as well clothed, well fed, well taught, and well cared for as is possible where such gathered numbers make separate mothering almost impossible. As a necessity, system, regularity, was the rule; from the rising in the morning till the retiring at night the ringing of the great bell ordered all; eating, play, work, study, was at its monition. And if any tried rebellion, as Posey at the first sometimes felt inclined to do, it was speedily to find that they but bruised themselves against the strong force which controlled the whole.

Into this routine Posey soon settled; she had her little white bed in one of the rows of the long dormitory, her desk in the schoolroom, her place in the work-room, where at certain hours in the day the girls worked at making paper boxes; and her group of friends in the playground. After the lonely isolation of most of her previous life it was a great change, this becoming one in such a multitude. But hardest of all for her was it to become used to the pressure of discipline, not severe but constant, the feeling that she was never free from the watchful, overlooking eye.