Presently Dora pushed back her chair and rose.
“I don't care for anything else,” she said, avoiding her mother's eyes.
“But you haven't eaten anything at all,” Mrs. Barry protested, anxiously.
“I can't eat—I simply can't,” Dora said, with strange and desperate frankness. “I'm too miserable. Oh, mother, mother, pity me! pity me!”
Mrs. Barry sat motionless, her head, with its scant hair, now supported by her two sinewy hands. She saw her daughter turn away, and, with dragging feet, go on to her bedroom.
“God, have mercy!” she moaned. “She's as good as admitted it. What else could she have meant? Oh, God, what else—what else? She must know what I am afraid of. Oh, my baby!—my poor, poor baby!”
She rose from her untasted meal and followed her child, not noticing, in the gathering dusk, that Mrs. Chumley had entered the outer door, and was treading softly and with bated breath in her wake. She found the girl standing at a window, dumb and pale, looking out into the yard.
“You must tell me everything, daughter,” Mrs. Barry said. “I can't sleep to-night unless you do. I am afraid I am going mad. Tell me, tell me!”
“Oh, mother, mother, how can I?”
“You are ruined!” Mrs. Barry groaned. “Tell me I am right—you are ruined!”