And it was the very next morning but one that Ally was not to be found—as you read in the beginning of the story—and the whole house and place and Valley were in commotion, and no one knew where to find her.
XII.
THE FLIGHT ON A STREET-CAR.
It was in this same lovely summer-time, far down in that dark, crowded city of which Aunt Rose had told the Children of the Valley, that one night a little girl, with a little baby in her arms, was standing in the doorway of a house that looked ready to fall on her.
A trickle of dirty water ran down the middle of the cobble-stones in front. The night was hot; men were asleep on their carts drawn up beside the walls, women were asleep hanging half out of the windows above for a breath of coolness, and other women had made some sort of bed on the pavement for their sick babies, and had stretched themselves on the hard stones beside them. The little girl’s home was in one room far up near the top of the house, a room that had no window in it, and out of it her mother had been carried to her grave the day before. The dark, small, airless place had grown dreadful with stifling heat; and she had taken the small baby brother in her arms, and crept down the long flights of stairs. Almost every other step was missing, and rats slipped along beside her.
It seemed heavenly to get down into the open air, foul and hot as that sort of open air was. She stepped out on the cobble-stones, picking her way through the gasping people there, no one noting her or caring about her.
She had heard some of the women in the house say that she and the baby were to be sent to an Institution. She did not know what that meant, but felt in it something of a vague horror. It would be a dreadful fate for her and for the little new baby. A resolve to run away from it had filled her whole being. She had heard cruel stories of places where poor children, like her, were sent—probably they were Institutions.
One of the more tender-hearted people who had been there that morning had given her some silver pieces. She had clutched and hidden them, and now she was wondering how far away they would take her.
She wandered on from one to another of the feebly-lighted lanes and alleys, hushing the baby, giving it her finger to suck, shifting it from shoulder to shoulder, and throwing back a swift glance of terror now and again lest anyone followed; for her fears had grown so that it seemed as if the whole alley, the whole city, were in a conspiracy to send her to the terrible Institution.