After that things moved very swiftly in the little Denby flat. It was Saturday morning, and there was no time to lose.
First, Helen gathered all the cash she had in the house, not forgetting the baby's bank (which yielded the biggest sum of all), and counted it. She had nineteen dollars and seventeen cents. Then she rummaged among her husband's letters and papers until she found a letter from Dr. Gleason bearing his Boston address. Next, with Bridget to help her, she flung into her trunk everything belonging to herself and the baby that it was possible to crowd in, save the garments laid out to wear. By three o'clock Bridget was paid and dismissed, and Helen, with Dorothy Elizabeth, was waiting for the carriage to take them to the railroad station.
With the same tearless exaltation that had carried her through the prodigious tasks of the morning, Helen picked up her bag and Dorothy Elizabeth, and followed her trunk down the stairs and out to the street. She gave not one backward glance to the little home, and she carefully avoided anything but an airy "Good-bye" to the watching Mrs. Cobb in the window on the other side. Not until the wheels began to turn, and the journey was really begun, did Helen's tearless exaltation become the frightened anxiety of one who finds herself adrift on an uncharted sea.
CHAPTER XI
IN QUEST OF THE STARS
In a roomy old house on Beacon Hill Dr. Frank Gleason made his home with his sister, Mrs. Ellery Thayer. The family were at their North Shore cottage, however, and only the doctor was at home on the night that Hawkins, the Thayers' old family butler, appeared at the library door with the somewhat disconcerting information that a young person with a baby and a bag was at the door and wished to speak to Dr. Gleason.
The doctor looked up in surprise.
"Me?" he questioned. "A woman? She must mean Mrs. Thayer."