For one moment the girl looked at the woman with frightened eyes, as though she could not quite comprehend the full import of what the woman was saying.
"It killed your mother!" she repeated pitilessly. "You might have known it would. She died of a broken heart!"
A long, low moan came from the girl's lips. The awful despair in the dark eyes would have touched any other heart, even though it were made of stone; but in Mrs. Deering's heart there was neither pity nor mercy.
"Go!" she repeated, threateningly, "and do not dare to ever darken my door again!"
"Will you tell me where you have buried my poor mother?" moaned Ida May, with bitter anguish.
"In the lot where the poor of the village are put," she answered, unfeelingly. "We had to have a mark put over her. You can easily find it. It's to the left-hand corner, the last one on the row. It would be better for you, you shameless girl, if you were lying beside her rather than sink to the lowest depths of the road you are traveling. Go—go at once!"
With trembling feet she crept down the broad path and out of the gate. She was drenched to the skin, and the chill October winds pierced through her thin wet clothes like the sharp cut of a knife. It did not matter much; nothing mattered for her any more. She was going to find her mother's grave, kneel down beside it, lay her tired head on the little green mound, and wait there for death to come to her, for surely God would grant her prayer and in pity reach out His hand to her and take her home. There would be a home there where her mother was, even if all other doors were closed to her.
She had little difficulty in finding the place—a small inclosure in the rear of the old church that had fallen into decay and crumbling ruins many years ago—and by the blinding flashes of lightning, she found the grave of her mother—her poor, suffering mother, the only being who had ever loved her in the great, cold, desolate earth.
"Mother," she sobbed, laying her face on the cold, wet leaves that covered the mound, "mother, I have come to you to die. The world has gone all wrong with me. I never meant to go wrong. I do not know how it happened. Other young girls have married the lovers whom they thought God had sent to them, and lived happy enough lives. I built such glorious air-castles of the home I should have, the handsome, strong young husband to love and to labor for me, and how you should live with me, mother, never having to work any more. But oh, mother, all my plans went wrong! I don't know why."
Ida May crouched there among the sleeping dead, her brain in a whirl; and the long night wore on. The storm subsided, the wind died away over the tossing trees and the far-off hills, and the rain ceased. Morning broke faint and gray in the eastern sky, and the flecks of crimson along the horizon presaged a bright and gladsome day.