"Didn’t you say that you’d worked for a milliner?" "Wouldn’t she——”
"Not on your life! My Lord! I don’t know what she wouldn’t say about me! She hated the sight of me. Jealous! No, there’s no one; but if you want to know more about me, you could go and see my mother."
"I might do that," said Mrs. Russell slowly. It was a good idea; she would certainly be praised for going to all this trouble in investigating the character of Polly’s companion. "Yes, I will. I’ll go down to the city and fetch you to-morrow morning. And be ready for me early, won’t you?—for I have so very little time." She went to the door, followed by Angelica; then out into the hall, where the patient row still sat, waiting for the turns she had promised them.
"I’m sorry," she told them, with an affable smile, "but the place is taken. Good morning!"
They all stared at her incredulously for a moment. Then, as she held open the front door, they got up, surged out together, and went down the hill in a straggling parade, all so shabby in the sunlight. The one who had been waiting so very long, in the dark under the stairs—a wan little thing in a befeathered hat—turned upon Angelica a dreadful look.
CHAPTER THREE
I
Angelica was ready by nine o’clock the next morning, with a bag in which was packed every decent thing she owned. The people in the flat above had been astounded by the sound of Mrs. Kennedy’s sewing-machine at two o’clock in the morning, for she and her child had sat up nearly all night, making ready. It was a melancholy, a heart-breaking work for the poor mother. She wasn’t going away. She had no adventure to excite her, no ambition, no hope, nothing but the bitter certainty of loneliness and poverty. She tried to be—not cheerful, for that she never was, but calm and reasonable, while all the time she had before her the spectre of the evening when she would come home to empty rooms, to eat her supper alone. A groan escaped her, which she tried to turn into a sigh.
"It’s the very, very worst that can happen to any one in this wide world," she thought; "to be left all alone, and getting old!"
She hadn’t been able to keep her eyes from Angelica, sitting bent over a blouse she was finishing, with her hair, just washed, hanging down her back, wet, straight, and heavy, drying about her face in a sort of mist of feathery tendrils.