“We have a little vesper service in the reception room, Mary Louise,” she said. “Would you like to come and join us?”
The girl jumped up eagerly. Anything would be better than this dreadful idleness.
“Don’t your patients have anything to do?” she inquired as she went down the hall with the nurse. “This doing nothing is enough to drive anybody crazy!” She smiled to herself at the use of the common expression and wondered whether Miss Stone noticed it.
But the nurse gave no sign of any amusement. “Oh, yes, Mary Louise,” she replied, “there will be lots for you to do tomorrow. Everybody takes some share in the work, if possible. Unless they are too ill. And we go for walks around the grounds and work in the garden. But we thought you’d be too tired tonight and would just want to rest.”
They joined a group of perhaps twenty people in the reception room for the singing of hymns, and the same woman who had met Mary Louise at the door of the building read the Bible. Mary Louise looked about curiously at her fellow inmates and did not find them particularly strange-looking. One or two of them had queer, staring eyes like Rebecca Adams, but for the most part they appeared normal. Which fact made it all the harder for Mary Louise to prove anything about herself to the caretakers!
At nine o’clock the service was over and everybody went to bed. But, exhausted as she was, Mary Louise could not go to sleep. She tried over and over to formulate some plan of escape, but with the locked doors, the constant supervision of nurses and attendants, and that high stone wall, it seemed absolutely hopeless.
It was only when the first gray light of dawn broke in the sky that she finally dozed off and then fell into a deep, heavy sleep.
CHAPTER XVI
Weary Waiting
Like her daughter, Mrs. Gay did not go to sleep until dawn of the following morning. Her mental torture was even keener than Mary Louise’s, for her imagination suggested all sorts of horrible fates, worse than the one the girl was actually enduring. Physical violence, association with hardened criminals, hunger, thirst—and—death. That was the most terrifying thought of all—the fear that Mary Louise might already be dead!
Like her daughter’s, too, Mrs. Gay’s suffering was all the more intense because she had to bear it alone through the long, silent night. Freckles and Jane, tired out from their vigorous search, had fallen instantly asleep. There was nobody to sympathize with the poor frenzied mother. She swallowed dose after dose of aspirin, until finally, with the first gray streaks of dawn, she at last fell asleep.