Miss Devery was the youngest in a family of nine—children of a poor clergyman in the south of England. She had begun her career as a governess in a French family. Leaving that, she had drifted about in Paris, studied drawing a little, and given English lessons, always charming and gay and perfectly at home. Then she had gone to a married brother in Australia, and after a few years of that, helping his wife with her babies on their sheep-farm, she had followed the commands of her own sweet and careless heart and gone to America. And here she was, at twenty-six, quite alone in the world, half-forgotten by her people at home, who were rather fond of her, but couldn’t keep her in mind.
Miss Sillon was different. Her father was a doctor who had ruined himself with drink, and she had had monstrous responsibilities and cares upon her shoulders ever since childhood, when her mother had died. God knows what she hadn’t tried, to earn her honest bread. She had been a children’s nurse in London, stewardess on a South American ship, librarian in a Canadian city; she had worked in a newspaper office and in a bakery, she had taught music in a suburban school. She was also entirely alone on earth, but it didn’t trouble her.
Both she and Miss Devery would have been able to pick up a living in any part of the civilized world. They were attached to each other, without being quite aware of their affection. They had met one day at a cheap lunch-room, and had rushed together like two morsels of quicksilver. Why not? They were more than harmonious; they were in essence identical.
II
How bitterly Mrs. Kennedy missed her wayward and troublesome child, who had ordered her about and sworn at her, and so vehemently kissed her! This neat young woman, busy at her books in the kitchen every evening, always up and dressed at the right time in the morning, was a stranger, was in no way hers. She would sit in the rocking-chair—after the kitchen was clean and tidy—and take up the newspaper Angelica had brought in, or perhaps a magazine, and pretend to read; but she never could. She had no habit of reading. Her great need was to talk.
She would look at her daughter, and rock and sigh. A weary world, where even rest had lost its beauty!
There were sometimes evenings when Miss Sillon and Miss Devery invited Angelica to go with them to one of the little Italian restaurants in the neighbourhood. In this case Angelica was always punctilious to telephone to her mother, and she was never out later than ten, so that it didn’t occur to her to pity the wretched woman.
She didn’t imagine how terrible those evenings were to Mrs. Kennedy, how she groped about the kitchen, blinded by tears, setting out her tiny meal, finding relief in loud sobs like hiccoughs. She saw that something was the matter with her mother, but she fancied that it was age, ill health, poverty, years of hardship.
It was none of these pains which so grievously afflicted Mrs. Kennedy. It was because she was being left behind. She who had all her life feared and foreseen that she would be obliged to die and leave her beloved child, now saw this child—as she had known her—quite dead and gone, and herself left desolate.