She was suddenly full of fear there in the darkness and the aloneness, and ran over to the cot for the miracle of that soft body to her flesh. She lifted it from the nest of coarse pillow, even in sleep the tendril of a little finger closing about hers.
There were crisscross shadows on the floor, cast there by the iron bars at the windows. Her child lay asleep in an institutional garb of charity. The father of that child, ignorant of its very existence, was at that moment, and at a distance of one thousand miles, adjusting a new rubber stopper to the bathtub in the home he shared with his parents-in-law.
On one of the empty cots the rather silly silhouette of Lilly's hat, its buckram rim sadly broken, persisted through the gloom. Her shoes, in a little attitude of waiting beside a chair, lopped slightly of a tipsiness induced by run-over heels. In the jumble of changing hands the black valise of her underwear, handkerchiefs, and baby garments had disappeared, so her little washed-out chemise, quite dainty, hung drying over a table edge.
Outside the Home for Indigent Girls a city that took absolutely no reckoning of Lilly wove its pattern toward another to-morrow.
She was alone with the first realization of her child, in a moment that might have shaped itself to crush her. She felt a throbbing that seemed to make a rush for her throat. She sat down on the bed, leaning over until her body formed a sort of cave about the child. She had a sense of the power to strangle both their lives out there in that strange darkness. An old fear leaned out at her.
"Am I mad?"
More and more the sense of wanting to strangle flowed over her.
"Here—to-night—now!"
A cry leaped up under her pressure, startled, and with a stab of pain in it.
She swooped the little squirming burden up under her chin; she buried her head into the warm froth of curls, the light wind of her laughter suddenly sweeping the room.