"What?" she asked.
There was no adequate answer to be made. Mary had tried to pledge her coat a few days before, and had been offered only an inadequate twenty-five cents for it.
"Then you won't—you can't wait?"
"No, I can't. I'm a sick woman myself; my rent's due, Miss Mary, an' the honest truth is that there's such a lot of women wantin' rooms that I'd only be doin' a injustice to my children not to take in a lady that could pay prompt—for a while."
Mary said nothing more. She packed her few belongings into her trunk, left it in the hall to be called for, and, as the chill evening fell, went away from the house with no idea where she was to find a lodging for the night. For an hour, though she was still weak, and the time was as yet so early, she walked up Broadway and, in the Forties, turned eastward for a few blocks, and so south again. Not far from the Grand Central Station she saw a little crowd gathered at a corner, and she stopped, rather for the luxury of standing still than from any curiosity.
The place was a church. Colored lights streamed from its rich stained-glass windows. Through its swinging doors there stole the scent of flowers and the sound of delicate music. A long row of carriages, the coachmen walking up and down to keep warm, stretched far around the corner.
Mary, shivering, worked her way quietly through the group of men and women on the sidewalk. In order to avoid a particularly entangled portion of the press, she started to walk along the steps by the tower-entrance, and then, seeing a side-door open, she listlessly turned toward it and looked in.
Far away up the vaulted nave the altar stood, white with damask and yellow with candles. The chancel was a garden, the whole building heavy with scent. Acolytes in scarlet were grouped about the robed priests. The choir had risen and, preceded by a lad that bore aloft a great brass cross, were forming into a singing procession, which slowly filed down the center aisle.
With a subdued scuffle and swish, the congregation also rose as the double line of choristers moved between them. Women craned their necks and men, pretending to look stolidly ahead of them, looked really out of the corners of their eyes. The choir, at the main door, divided and stood still. High overhead a deep-toned organ was playing the wedding-march from Lohengrin, and through the respectful line of white-clad boys there moved a man of regular features with lowered lids that hid his eyes, and a crisp brown mustache, which concealed his lips, and, on his arm, in the costume of a bride, a tall, graceful, pure woman, whose face was like a Greek cameo and in whose hand was a huge bunch of orchids and lilies-of-the-valley.
The fingers of a policeman touched Mary's arm.