CHAPTER XXXIII

Mary Burton was returning from a Sixth-avenue delicatessen shop with the bottle of milk and box of crackers which constituted the marketing for tomorrow morning’s breakfast.  She felt very faint and unspeakably sick at heart.  There was no longer even a trivial thing with which to interest the pawnbroker.  She had had little sleep for many nights and her temples throbbed with pain.  She had been trying to think out some way to mend their misfortunes, and each day brought her nearer the point where the grinding struggle must end in starvation.

“If it were only myself,” she said bitterly as she turned the corner under the superstructure of the Elevated, and shivered in the cutting wind of the blizzard which was sweeping the city, “it would be simple.”  She paused a moment later and halted against the wall of Jefferson Market Court where a brick abutment broke the force of the bluster.  Mary was not so warmly clad as this rigorous weather warranted.  The last thing she had taken to the sign of the three balls was a heavy cloak.

“For me,” she said to herself as she bent her head into the smother of wind-driven snow, “life ended there in that office—­when he died.  If I had just myself to consider I don’t think God would blame me much for ending it.”

But it was not only herself she had to consider.  The doctors told her that her mother’s tenuous life strand might snap at any time in sudden death or might stretch indefinitely in helplessness and dethroned reason.  Even in the mean lodgings they occupied other tenants were sometimes prone to the drawing of lines, and Mary knew that the landlord did not regard it as helpful to his business to have “a crazy lady in the house.  Some guests objected.”  So when she began falling into arrears she did not delude herself with false hopes of charitable indulgence.  Her father, too, though he had dropped down the scale of life to a forlorn old man who loafed his hours away in saloons until he was turned out, was still her father and while breath remained in his disreputable body his stomach required food as well as drink.

The girl went in at the dark door of the house, which was not greatly different from a tenement, and climbed the double flight of stairs.  From a place by the window her mother looked up from her chair where she sat incessantly rocking.  She held in her lap an old blank book and her expression was vacant.

“I’ve just been reading Ham’s diary,” she querulously announced.  Mary shuddered.  Of late her mother was always reading that old record of boyhood ambitions, which to her was always new since no memory—­save those of other years—­outlasted the hour.

“Ham thinks he’s going to be a great man some day and I hope he’s right.  He’s a good boy and a dutiful son and—­”

But the daughter was not listening.  Her eyes had encountered an envelope on the dresser mirror, and, as she tore the end of it, she felt a premonition of its contents.