She did not know this—no one had ever told her so, and she was fated to learn it in the hardest fashion by cruel experience. She was learning, too, in all their subtle pathos the truth of those mournful lines:
"Alas! the love of women, it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing,
For all of theirs upon the die is thrown,
And if 'tis lost life has no more to bring."
Those were sad and heavy days that followed on her flitting to New York. She was almost crazed with the bitterness of her despair. There were weeks that were afterward almost a blank to her because she spent them in tears that were like drops of blood wrung from her aching, bleeding heart. She lay all day on her little bed vainly dwelling on the irrevocable past, looking back on all that she had lost with incurable longing and bitter regret. When this season of lamenting had worn itself out, Laurel grew hard and proud and tried to forget—a hard task that many, stronger than our little heroine, have essayed in vain.
After awhile she found out that she would have to draw again on the contents of her already diminished purse. There were garments to be provided for the little stranger that was coming to brighten her darkened life. She would not choose coarse, cheap garments now, such as she had bought for herself. She selected the finest, whitest linen, the softest, warmest flannel, the daintiest muslin, and was even a little extravagant in the matter of dainty laces and Hamburg trimmings. Then, when the complete and pretty outfit was laid away, with lavender and rose-leaves between the snowy folds, Laurel counted the few dollars that were left from her expenditures, and became frightened.
"When it is all gone, what shall I do?" she asked herself, blankly. "Where is the next to come from?"
And her startled reason harshly answered her: "You will have to work for it. You will have to earn it."
Laurel did not know how to earn money. She had never been taught any available thing, and her delicate condition of health precluded the idea of going out into the busy world to toil. Besides, her morbid sensibilities shrunk from the thought of encountering strangers who would look upon her with coldness, perhaps suspicion.
She was in despair at first, but she suddenly remembered how easily and quickly her reckless, pleasure-loving father had earned the wherewithal for their support.
"The publishers were always eager for papa's MSS.," she said to herself hopefully; "and, being his daughter, I must have inherited his genius. I will write."