At ten o’clock Mrs. Russell hadn’t come yet, and Mrs. Kennedy couldn’t
wait any longer. She was obliged to go out and scrub the halls. She had
her best black silk blouse on, too, and she was dreadfully nervous about
splashing. Every half-hour or so she ran down-stairs to her child, to
see if the lady hadn’t come yet, and found Angelica scornfully waiting,
reading a magazine.
At one o’clock they sat down in the kitchen to a hurried meal of tea and
bread, ready to hide all traces of it at the first sound of the
door-bell.
"I promised Mrs. Schell I’d do her kitchen floor this afternoon," said
Mrs. Kennedy, with an anxious frown. "What do you want me to do about
it, Angie?"
"Go ahead! If she comes, I’ll run up and get you."
She spent a miserable afternoon. She scrubbed with conscientious vigour,
but with an absent mind. She thought the same thoughts over and
over--first, how disappointed Angie would be if the lady never came;
then that perhaps, after all, she wasn’t going to lose her.
"Maybe we’ll have supper together again this very night!" she would
think hopefully.
Upon the heels of her hope came the certainty that if Angelica didn’t go
away now, she would later. It was sure to come; no chance whatever that
such a girl would stop there, underground, with her.
When she came down again for the last time, at six o’clock, Angelica was
in the little parlour, now black as the pit, and she was so very still
that her mother felt disturbed. She was afraid that the poor, proud
thing was grieving, and she went in to her, noiseless in her thin old
shoes; but when she had lighted the lamp, she saw that Angelica was
sleeping, stretched out limp and childish in the big rocking-chair.
Mrs. Kennedy hurried away breathlessly to the grocer’s, to buy a little
treat; for weren’t they going to have supper together again after all?