With a bitter sense of disappointment swelling in her little heart, she turned to go back to the carriage, and then stood still in bewilderment. She could not tell which way she had come. She was lost herself! For a few minutes the little pink boots trudged bravely on, then the tears began to gather in her big black eyes.
"They'll feel so bad at home," she thought, "when they hunt and hunt and can't find me anywhere. Oh, what if I'd stay lost, and get to look all ragged and dirty like Dot, and just have to stand in a corner and cry. If there was any nice stores along here, I'd go in and ask the man to send me home, but these places look so dreadful I'm afraid."
She was in a disreputable part of the town, where second-hand clothing stores and pawn-shops were crowded in between saloons and cheap restaurants, and she dared not venture into any of them to ask for help. Little as she was, she felt that she was safer on the streets than inside those crowded, dirty quarters, where half-drunken negroes and coarse, brawling white men quarrelled and swore in loud tones.
"It's the saloons that brought all the trouble to Molly and Dot," thought Elise, shrinking away from a group of noisy loafers, as they straggled out of one. "They made their father mean and their mother die and their grandmother go crazy and them lose each other. They're worse than wild beasts, and I'm afraid of 'em. Maybe if I walk far enough I'll come to a nice policeman, but I'm so tired now." Her lip quivered as she whispered the words. "Oh, it seems as if I'd drop! And I'm so cold I am nearly frozen."
As she walked on, across her way an electric arch suddenly shot its cold white light into the street. Then another and another appeared, and as far as she could see in any direction the streets were brilliantly illuminated.
"Oh, it's night!" she sobbed. "I'll freeze to death before morning if somebody doesn't come and find me."
Still she dragged on, growing more tired and frightened at every step, until she could walk no longer. At the end of a long block she sat down on a doorstep, and huddled up in one corner out of the wind. A dismal picture came to her mind of the little match-seller in Hans Andersen's fairy tales. The little match-seller who had frozen to death on Christmas eve, on the threshold of somebody's happy home.
"She had a box of matches to warm herself with," sobbed Elise. "I haven't even that. Oh, it's awful to be lost!"