At length the darkness faded, and it was daylight once again. Still she stumbled on until at last she came to the gates of Kennington Park and found them open. The park was almost deserted. Without intention she took one of the quiet side-walks apart from the main one, along which a few workmen were hastening with their tool-baskets over their shoulders.
Here she found a sheltered seat, and, sitting into the corner of it, fell fast asleep.
It was three hours before she awoke. She was aroused by the voices of children journeying on their way to school. She heard some of them talk of a fountain, and then all ran away. She followed them, and having waited until they had scampered off and no one else was near, she reached up and filled the little cup and drank, and felt greatly refreshed by her sleep and the delicious cool water she had been so long thirsting for.
Then she sat down again and rested till noon. She was too feeble and worn out to think of any plan for the future. She forgot she had money in her pocket and that she could buy food. After the horrors of the evening and night she could think of nothing but that it was cheerful day again with the security of light and people around her.
At noon she rose and tried to walk a little, but felt so tired and footsore that she went no farther than the next chair, and then sat down. But day waned and evening came on, and the time for shutting the park arrived. What was to become of her now? She had not the courage to go to that fountain since, as the people began to appear soon after the children passed by. And now she was thirsty and tired and hungry, and did not know whither to turn. Her mind was enfeebled like her body, and beyond the firm resolution not to go back to Knightsbridge and a consciousness of an obligation to keep moving, she had no clear perception of anything.
She had for some time been walking down a large and populous road, and now she suddenly came upon a railway viaduct. In an idle effortless way she looked up, and found she was near Waterloo Station. Often, when she had gone little journeys with her aunt, before Miss Traynor had been altogether laid up, she had been to Waterloo Station, and had often rested in the waiting-room, It occurred to her she might do so now. She turned into the station, found a waiting-room, and sat down.
She selected a corner, and had not sat many minutes when all the objects in view grew softer and less angular to her eyes, and when her sense of desolation diminished, until the faculties of her nature were centred on the one supreme physical sensation of the deliciousness of rest. She settled her shoulders more comfortably into the corner, and before she was conscious of drowsiness was asleep.
Mrs. Carpenter, a widow in comfortable circumstances, living in lodgings at Wilkinson Street, Kennington, had that day made up her mind to go south to some relatives for awhile. Although she had got the letter of invitation days ago, she had not answered it until that day, and then she telegraphed that she would be with them late that night, by the last train, or the train before the last.
Mrs. Carpenter was, in a few ways, a little eccentric. In all London there was not a woman with a warmer or more humane heart, but in some things she was not as other people. She had a habit of making up her mind suddenly, and unmaking it quite as quickly. She conceived violent likes and dislikes, without being able to account for them. She trusted altogether to instinct, and pooh-poohed reason. She had her troubles and trials in the world, but she was now, as far as money went, above any chance of evil fortune, and what she loved most was to help others who were deserving and were not so fortunate.
She was not what is popularly called a charitable woman. She did not give half-crowns to tramps or large sums to hospitals and other charitable institutions. But she found out men who could get no work because of the want of tools, or women whose children were hungry because of their mother's illness, or some other case of blameless distress, and then she stretched forth no niggard hand, but one open and free, and full of aid and kindly counsel. She did not sermonise away the value of her gifts or loans, or make them an opportunity for dwelling upon any particular form of faith. If she found people hungry and deserving, she gave them bread, without making it the price of a pious mortgage.