“Go to the drug-store there at the corner and get this prescription filled,” he ordered. “It’s morphine. I’ve got to sleep tonight.”
Elsie obeyed passively. When she returned Druce was pacing the room wild with impatience. His greenbacks and a bottle of absinthe lay on the table.
He lost no time in resorting to the morphine. “Absinthe is the stuff to put life in your body; but it’s the good old dope to make you forget all your troubles,” he soliloquized, Very shortly he was on the bed, sound asleep.
Elsie paced softly back and forth in the room for a long time. Then she went out into the dark hallway. She opened the window and stood looking into the street. It was quiet there. The stars looked down on a deserted way.
That big bright star over there! Was it not the one she and her sister used to choose when wishing from their bedroom window at Millville! How long ago that seemed; how wide and dreadful life’s abyss between!
“If I had known, if I had known!” Elsie shuddered and glanced towards the closed door. “I was bound to have my own way. My—own—way. That’s it. There was something in me—” She faced her actions, she probed into her thoughts from the hour she first met Martin Druce. She marshalled her scathing shames before the judgment bar of her womanhood. In the flaming fires of tortured conscience she stood and suffered.
Then she began to wonder about the future. Where was she bound? Where would he be sent? What strange lands might she see?
How could she go with him? How could she stay behind? The street—the dreadful streets of night!
Elsie shuddered, remembering those nights in the Levee, the fear and horror, and at last the shameful, gnawing hunger that drove her to him again.
Back in the room where the dive-keeper lay in stupor Elsie spread a quilt on the floor and went wearily to her broken rest.