Chapter 3

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday passed sadly and slowly enough, and at five
o'clock on the evening of the last day Fan was told at St. Mary's--that
Margaret Harrod was dead. During those three miserable days of suspense
she had spent most of her time hanging about the doors of the hospital,
going timidly at intervals to inquire, and to ask to be allowed to see
her mother. But her request was refused. Her mother was suffering from
concussion of the brain, besides other serious injuries, and continued
unconscious; nothing was to be gained by seeing her.

Without a word, without a tear, she turned away from the dreary gates and
walked slowly back to Moon Street; and at intervals on her homeward walk
she paused to gaze about her in a dazed way, like a person who had
wandered unknowingly into some distant place where everything wore a
strange look. The old familiar streets and buildings were there, the big
shop-windows full of cheap ticketed goods, the cab-stand and the
drinking-fountain, the omnibuses and perpetual streams of' foot-
passengers on the broad pavement. She knew it all so well, yet now it
looked so unfamiliar. She was a stranger, lost and alone there in that
place and everywhere. She was walking there like one in a dream, from
which there would be no more waking to the old reality; no more begging
pence from careless passers-by in the street; no more shrinking away and
hiding herself with an unutterable sense of shame and degradation from
the sight of some neighbour or old school acquaintance; no more going
about in terror of the persecution and foul language of the gangs of
grown-up boys and girls that spent their evenings in horse-play in the
streets; no more going home to the one being she loved, and who loved
her, whose affection supplied the food for which her heart hungered.

Arrived at her home, she did not go up as was her custom to her dreary
room at the top, but remained standing in the passage near the landlady's
door; and presently Mrs. Clark, coming out, discovered her there.

"Well, Fan, how's mother now?" she asked in a kind voice.

"She's dead," returned Fan, hanging her head.

"Dead! I thought it 'ud be that! Dear, dear! poor Margy, so strong as she
was only last Saturday, and dead! Poor Margy, poor dear--we was always
friendly"--here she wiped away a tear--"as good a soul as ever breathed!
_That_ she was, though she did die like that; but she never had a
chance, and went to the bad all on account of him. Dead, and he on the
drink--Lord only knows where he gits it--and lying there asleep in his
room, and his poor wife dead at the hospital, and never thinking how he's
going to pay the rent. I've stood it long enough for poor Margy, poor