"What are you doing?" she cried. "Surely you will not take the child out to-night!"
Penny made no answer, but fetched her own outdoor clothes and dressed hastily.
"Where are you going, on such a night?" cried the other excitedly.
"Anywhere," answered Penny, her lips white and her eyes flashing.
"Anywhere out of reach of that man."
"No, no!" the woman expostulated. "Wait till morning! I'll see him then and settle everything."
"What can you settle that can make me stay?" asked Penny, in bitter
wrath. "Do you think that I would spend another night under this roof?
Wait here and see him, if you wish—you have the right to be here, not I!
He will never see me again."
She ran back into her bedroom for the little purse. In it were a few pounds she had saved up to buy the man an easy chair for his coming birthday. How often she had pictured his pleasure when he would be able to lean back comfortably in it on the opposite side of the fireplace and smoke his evening pipe, his handsome face beaming love and admiration. The vision filled her with fresh loathing. She scarcely bade the other woman good-night, but clasping her babe hurried from the room. Swiftly down the stairs she ran, heedless of the cries of the woman she had left behind, and out into the wind and rain of the dreary street—fit emblem, in its forlorn wretchedness, of the future which loomed hopeless before her.
* * * * * *
Two things added to the poignancy of Penny's unavailing grief in after years: the innocence of Arthur Spence of any deception (except silence regarding his past), and the fact that she never knew this until he had given his life in his country's service. It was then too late to reap comfort in her supreme sorrow from the knowledge of his uprightness both to herself and to the wretched woman who had caused her unreflecting flight on that fatal night.
For many months she had been hidden from all her former acquaintances in the Convent of Mercy, whose Superior she had long been intimate with. There she had nursed her baby through an illness which at last proved fatal. Grief at the loss of her little one, added to her already heavy burden of trouble, had told upon her own health, and for weeks she had needed to be nursed herself. After her recovery, as she shrank from returning home, the good Sisters obtained for her the post of nurse with our family.