She remembered afterward how miraculously this prayer was answered. She was scrubbing the vestibule--a task of peculiar hopelessness, because people always came in to walk over it all the time she was trying to clean it. She heard a voice say "Mommer!" and, looking up, saw her child, huddled in an old wrapper, standing before her. Angelica was struggling with a deadly nausea. She was frightened and desperate, her face a sickly white, her hair in dank disorder. "Mommer!" she said again. "Come down-stairs! I feel awful sick!" Her mother got up, leaving pail and brush where they were, and put an arm around this beloved child, so much taller and stronger than she, and yet, in her youth and her ignorance, so much weaker. She helped her down-stairs and into bed again. "Lie still!" she said. "That’s the best you can do, my deary. It’ll pass away." "Can’t you get me some sort of medicine, mommer?" "Nothing that would help you, my deary," Mrs. Kennedy told her. "You’ve just got to bear it, Angelica." The girl looked up with somber eyes. "Mommer," she said, "listen! What do you guess is the matter with me?" "Angelica, my deary, I _know_!" "Then, mommer, I’m going to kill myself!" Her mother said nothing at all, but to herself she thought: "Why not? It would be the best and the quickest for both of us. If you don’t--oh, what’s ahead of us, and how ever can we go through with it?" Angelica searched her mother’s face, but in vain; it was impassive. "What else _can_ I do?" she cried. "There’s always something that can be done," said her mother. "We’ll try and think, deary." "Mommer!" "Yes, my deary?" "Do you feel--different to me?" "No, Angelica, nor ever shall!" But she did. Strong in the simple soul was the old worship of the virgin. Angelica had been before a mystic and holy thing. She was now no more than a woman, like herself; and a woman is no fit object for worship. Mrs. Kennedy wasn’t shocked, in a moral sense. She didn’t dwell much upon that side of the case. Her great concern was with practical problems--above all, how they were to get the money which she knew would be needed. She always spoke of girls in similar situations as "unfortunate," and that is just the way she saw it. She sat at the bedside, trying her best to make some sort of plan. CHAPTER TWO I But Angelica herself! That _she_ should be undergoing this horror, this nightmare, this incredible thing she had heard of and read of! "Oh, mommer!" she cried. "Oh, _mommer_! It’s the worst thing I ever heard of! I’m the worst----” "Hush, deary! Don’t talk so wild. It’s bad, I must admit, but you’re young, and I dare say you loved the man and trusted in him, to your sorrow."