Her coadjutor in the ceremony of summoning this little spirit from the vasty deep had not followed her to the city where the miracle was achieved. He was poor, and his parents would have been brokenhearted; his employer in the village would have taken away his seven-dollar-a-week job.
So the boy sent the girl to town alone, with what money he had saved up and what little he could borrow; and he stayed in the village to earn more.
The girl's name was Lightfoot—Hilda Lightfoot—a curiously prophetic name for her progress in the primrose path, though she had gone heavy-footed enough afterward. And now she could hardly walk at all.
Hilda Lightfoot had come to the city in no mood to enjoy its frivolities, and with no means. She had climbed the four flights to her room a few days ago for the last time. In all the weeks and weeks she had never had a caller, except, the other day, a doctor and a nurse, who had taken away most of her money and left her this little clamorous youth, whose victim she was as he was hers.
To-night she was desperately lonely. Even the baby's eternal demands and uproars were hushed in sleep. She felt strong enough now to go out into the wonderful air of the city; the breeze was as soft and moonseeped as the blithe night wind that blew across the meadows at home.
The crowds went by the window and teased her like a circus parade marching past a school.
But she could not go to circuses—she had no money. All she had was a nameless, restless baby.
She grew frantically lonely. She went almost out of her head from her solitude, the jail-like loneliness, with no one to talk to except her little fellow-prisoner who could not talk.
Her homesick heart ran back to the home life she was exiled from. She was thinking of the village. It was prayer-meeting night, and the moon would wait outside the church like Mary's white-fleeced lamb till the service was over, and then it would follow the couples home, gamboling after them when they walked, and, when they paused, waiting patiently about.
The moon was a lone white lamb on a shadowy hill all spotted with daisies. Everything in the world was beautiful except her fate, her prison, her poverty, and her loneliness.