One day—a chilly afternoon in May—Aldo did not come home. Minna had gone to fetch Anne-Marie from school, when a messenger rang and gave Nancy a sealed letter.
In it Aldo said the chance of his life had come, and that he could not throw it aside—no! for her own sake, and for the child's, he would not do so. He thought not of himself. His thwarted ambitions, his warped talents, his stifled nature, had cried for a wider horizon. But not for this was he taking so grave a step. One day she would know how he was sacrificing himself for her sake. And he would open his arms, and she would fall on his breast and thank him. (Here was a blur—where Aldo's tear had fallen.) And he enclosed five hundred dollars. She was to be careful, as five hundred dollars was a large sum—two thousand five hundred francs. And she might take a smaller flat, and pay Minna eight dollars a month instead of ten. And she had better not write about this to Italy, as probably in a few months' time everything would be explained, and now farewell, and the Saints protect them! And she was to pray for him. And he was for ever her unhappy Aldo.
The messenger had darted off as soon as she had signed his receipt, and Nancy sat down, rigid and dazed, with her letter and the five-hundred-dollar bill in her hand.
Aldo was not coming back. Aldo had left her and the child to struggle through life alone. All that day she carried her heart cold and stern as a rock in her delicate breast.
In the evening she went into his room. True, it was a mean and miserable room. Everything in it—from the small window that looked out on a dark, damp wall to the torn carpet, from the crooked folding-bedstead to the broken piece of mirror leaning against the wall on the narrow mantelpiece—everything was horrible, everything was good to get away from. Nancy looked round, and pity drove the stinging tears to her eyes. Poor Aldo! What had Aldo had, after all, to come home to? Not love. For the love that would have carried them through and over such wretchedness was not in Nancy's heart. Her love for him had been all for his beauty; her love had been a delicate, sensitive, blow-away creature, half ghost, half angel, whom to wound was to kill. And Fate had amused itself by throwing bricks and bats at it, choking it under mountains of ugliness, kicking it through crowded streets, dragging it up squalid stairs.... When Nancy drew the sheet from its face, she saw that it had been dead a long time. And she was sorry for Aldo.
She pulled his trunk out from under the bed, and remorsefully and compassionately put all his things into it—his books, his broken comb and cheap brushes, his old patent-leather shoes that he wore about the house instead of slippers, some packets of cigarettes. When she opened his dark cupboard, and saw that all the new clothes had been taken away, she smiled with a little sigh, and remembered how pale he had looked when he said good-bye that morning.
How had he got those five hundred dollars to give her? She knelt down suddenly beside the open trunk, and said a prayer for him, as he had wished her to do. When she rose and shut the trunk, she shut in it the memory of Aldo, that was not to be with her any more.
Anne-Marie hardly noticed her father's absence, talking of him occasionally in the airy, detached manner of children; but Minna went for a week with red eyes and swollen face. And after a while the accounts rose with a rush.
Nancy paid all her debts, bought some clothes, and gave Mrs. Johnstone notice. She engaged a suite in a fashionable boarding-house on Lexington Avenue. Peggy and George stayed with her the last day in the flat, and helped her with her packing; but in the evening they went back to their rooms, for they were expecting a friend—Mr. Markowski, a Pole—who was to come and make music with George.
Anne-Marie was asleep, and Nancy sat down in the denuded room where everything belonging to her had already been put away. The dead Mr. Johnstone looked sadly at her, and even the piano-lamp was bland and dulcet, shining on the roses that George had brought her.