They all stared at her incredulously for a moment. Then, as she held open the front door, they got up, surged out together, and went down the hill in a straggling parade, all so shabby in the sunlight. The one who had been waiting so very long, in the dark under the stairs--a wan little thing in a befeathered hat--turned upon Angelica a dreadful look. CHAPTER THREE I Angelica was ready by nine o’clock the next morning, with a bag in which was packed every decent thing she owned. The people in the flat above had been astounded by the sound of Mrs. Kennedy’s sewing-machine at two o’clock in the morning, for she and her child had sat up nearly all night, making ready. It was a melancholy, a heart-breaking work for the poor mother. _She_ wasn’t going away. She had no adventure to excite her, no ambition, no hope, nothing but the bitter certainty of loneliness and poverty. She tried to be--not cheerful, for that she never was, but calm and reasonable, while all the time she had before her the spectre of the evening when she would come home to empty rooms, to eat her supper alone. A groan escaped her, which she tried to turn into a sigh. "It’s the very, very worst that can happen to any one in this wide world," she thought; "to be left all alone, and getting old!" She hadn’t been able to keep her eyes from Angelica, sitting bent over a blouse she was finishing, with her hair, just washed, hanging down her back, wet, straight, and heavy, drying about her face in a sort of mist of feathery tendrils. Angelica was glad, she was delighted to go. She certainly loved her mother, but a separation of a week, a month, a year, didn’t trouble her, didn’t cause her a pang. She knew in theory that life is terribly uncertain, but she didn’t really believe it. She felt sure that no matter where she went, or how long she stayed, her mother would be there at home, absolutely unchanged. She was the child who has never been burnt, sitting before the glowing fire. Having as yet never lost anything, she didn’t value anything. In that enticing future toward which she looked, she expected to live once more with her mother. In the meantime it didn’t matter. "Well!" said Mrs. Kennedy. "I’ll have no one to go to the movies with now." "You wait!" said Angelica. "One of these days I’ll take you to a _real_ show, mommer!" Already she saw herself the benefactor. She had forgotten, or perhaps didn’t even know, how limitlessly she had received. They went to bed in the early morning, and Angelica slept, while her weary mother lay awake at her side in the narrow bed they shared. The room was too dark for her to see anything, but she could hear the breathing of her dear child, and with a furtive hand feel that soft, slippery hair, still fresh and redolent of white soap. "I’ve got to expect it!" she told herself over and over. "I’ve got to expect it! They all go, for one reason or another. We’ve got to make up our minds to lose everything in this world."