She stopped short.
"No!" she said. "I can’t do this. I thought I could, but I can’t. I got to have him back. I’d rather he died home with me. Oh, I wish we were dead, the two of us, dead and buried—him and me in one grave!"
She turned and retraced her long road to Polly’s house, as far as the door; but she did not go in.
"No! Him in there with a trained nurse—no! I’ll give him his chance, my poor little feller; and I’ll give myself a chance, too," she added. She started down-town again; but the nearer she got to home, the more unbearable was the idea of entering there, alone.
"If only I was over this first night!" she moaned. "If I could only just forget him till to-morrow!"
II
Mrs. Kennedy kept on working. She didn’t dare to stop, to give herself a moment to think.
They were both gone. Very well! She would simply expect them back, resolutely refusing to think where they had gone, what they might be doing. At five o’clock in the afternoon she began to clean her flat. Then she cooked a nice little supper and set it in the oven to keep warm. She mixed condensed milk and water in a bottle for the baby. She boiled its dirty clothes. Then, in a desperate search for work to do, she found an old pair of white shoes of Angelica’s, and began to clean them, singing all the while in a weird, cracked voice:
"Af-ter the ball is o-ver, af-ter the ball is done."
She was trying with all her might to keep out of her head a terrible vision of a young mother standing on a bridge at night, with her baby in her arms.