At last she arose with an effort, and casting a regretful look back upon the water, as if she longed to sleep beneath it, moved up the street again, her frail figure wavering to and fro, like the stalk of a flower, beneath the light weight of her bundle. Thus she disappeared in one of the cross streets that intersect the Second Avenue.
We find her again, just at nightfall, panting with fatigue, before a palace-building in the vicinity of Murry Hill. There she stood, grasping the iron fence with her hands, afraid to advance, and physically unable to retreat. It was a pitiful sight, that fair young creature, trembling beneath the weight of her little bundle, and kept only from falling to the earth by the hold she had clenched on the cold iron.
The brown front of the building loomed above her with forbidding grandeur. The sculptured lions, crouching on the stone pedestals each side the broad entrance-steps, seemed frowning her away. But there she stood, breathless and wavering, afraid to let go her hold lest she should fall to the earth.
The gas had just been kindled within the house, and a flood of light came pouring through the stained sashes of a bay-window, and fell like a gorgeous rain on the pavement, illuminating, as it were, her misery.
The young woman fell back, and slowly retreated from the light, clutching at the iron fence at every step.
“Oh that I could get away!—oh that I had not come! I am sinking—they will find me senseless on the pavement. Oh, my God, give me strength—one moment’s strength.”
There was strong mental energy in that frail creature, and the desperate cry with which she appealed to God seemed to win down life from heaven. She unclenched her hand from the railing, paused an instant, casting her eyes first to the basement entrance and then to the sunken arch guarded by the lions, and walked on with something of firmness, nay, even of pride in the movement.
“No, not there,” she said, passing the basement, and mounting the flight of steps hurriedly, as one who felt her strength giving way, “I am her sister’s child, and will enter here.”
She rang the bell and waited, struggling firmly against her weakness, and sustained by that moral courage which is the only true bravery of womanhood.
“I have done no wrong,” she thought, “why should this terror come over me? If poverty and helplessness were a sin, then I might tremble, but not now—not for this—not because I have left a pauper’s bed for her stone palace.”