It was of a trembling man bent with age and loneliness.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE CALL OF ETERNITY
Elsie walked on and on eastward towards the lake. For a week she had been living alone in a room she had found near the park on the night that she left Harvey Spencer, telephoning in the drug-store. She had resolved that instant to go. It was to be “Now or never”—and she hurried away in an opposite direction from the hiding place—and from Druce.
The little money that he had put in her hands for drugs had somehow lasted her until now. She had been too ill to go out, her body racked with fever.
She was conscious that she must tomorrow find some work to do, for the landlady had twice asked her for the next week’s rent. She looked in at the door of a laundry where a German woman was singing as she ironed children’s dresses by the light of a flaring gas jet. It looked pleasant and peaceful in there. Perhaps that motherly woman would let her work with her. She would see tomorrow.
Elsie walked on towards the lake. She wanted to look at the water. She wanted to breathe the cool breath of great winds coming over the water to cool this fierce fire of shame and horror fevering her soul, flaming in her delicate cheeks.
Elsie came to the lake front at a wide high lot between two comfortable mansions on Sheridan Road.