“Very well,” he answered, adopting her business-like tone, “so it is. Now, then, Lena! What next? What are you going to do? Have you any home—any friends—anywhere to turn?”
“I have no friend on all God’s earth but you, sir,” said Lena drearily, “but I guess I’ll manage, somehow. I can mostly do what I set out to.”
“Your mother?” asked Bayard gently.
“She died when my baby was born, sir. She died of the shame of it. I was fifteen year old.”
“Oh! and the—the man? The father of your child?”
“He was a gentleman. He was a married man. I worked for him, in a shop. He ain’t dead. But I’d sooner go to hell than look to him.”
“I’d about as soon you would”—the minister said in his heart. But his lips answered only,—“You poor girl! You poor, poor, miserable girl!”
Then, for the first time, Lena broke down, and began to cry, there, on the streets, in the sight of every one.
“I must find you work—shelter—home—with some lady. I will do whatever can be done. Rely on me!” cried Bayard helplessly.
He began to realize what he had done, in undertaking Lena’s “case” without the help of a woman. Confusedly he ran over in his mind the names of the Christian women whom he knew, to whom he could turn in this emergency. He thought of Helen Carruth; but an image of the Professor’s wife, her mother, being asked to introduce Lena into the domestic machinery of a Cesarea household, half amused and half embittered him. He remembered the wife of his church treasurer, a kindly woman, trained now to doing the unexpected for Christ’s sake.