The Time of Roses

by L. T. Meade

"I have yielded," she said to herself. "What is to be done?" She got up desperately.

"I must not think, that is evident," was her next sensation. She could not take any more breakfast. She was too tired, too stunned, too unnerved. She dressed herself slowly, and determined, after posting the necessary money to her mother, to go the round of the different registry-offices where she had entered her name.

"If there is any chance, any chance at all, I will tell Edith Franks the truth to-night," she said to herself. "If there is no chance of my earning money—why, this sum that mother has demanded of me means the reducing of my store to seven pounds and some odd silver—I shall be penniless before many weeks are over. What is to be done?"

Florence wrote a short letter to her mother. She made no allusions whatever to the little woman's comments with regard to the dangers in which she herself was placed.

"I am extremely likely to die of starvation, but there is no other danger in my living alone in London," she thought, with a short laugh. And then she went to a post-office and got the necessary postal orders, and put them into the letter, and registered it and sent it off.

"Oh, Mummy, do be careful," she said, in the postscript; "it has been rather hard to spare you this, though, of course I do it with a heart and a half."

Afterwards poor Florence went the dreary round—from Harley-street to Bond-street, from Bond-street to Regent-street, from Regent-street to the Strand did she wander, and in each registry-office she received the same reply: "There is nothing at all likely to suit you."

At last, in a little office in Fleet-street, she was handed the address of a lady who kept a school, and who might be inclined to give Florence a small post.

"The lady came in late last night," said the young woman who spoke to her across a crowded counter, "and she said she wanted someone to come and live in the house and look after a lot of girls, and she would be glad to make arrangements, as term would begin in about a fortnight. You might look her up. I know the salary will be very small; but I think she is willing to give board and lodging."

Slightly cheered by this vestige of hope, Florence mounted an omnibus, and presently found herself at South Kensington. She found the right street, and stopped before a door of somewhat humble dimensions. She rang the bell. A charwoman opened the door after some delay, told her that Mrs. Fleming was within, and asked her what her message was.