Evenings she would say, "I'll be goin' t' yer aunt's a bit," and slip away into the engulfing dark, to reappear in the glare of light marking the entrance to some cheap West Side theater or dance hall. Gradually her excursions extended downtown, where she would take up her station at the door of some place of amusement and stand watching the pleasure-seekers pour in, then turn away and wander aimlessly up and down the streets for an hour or so before facing homeward. In some way she heard about stage doors, and took to haunting them. She saw many girls of Angela's type, and wondered sadly if their mothers knew where they were, but her own girl was not among them. In those nights on the flaming streets she learned more about vice than she had ever dreamed of in all her life, and the world came to seem to her a vast trap set by the bestial for the unwary. Not hunger, nor cold, nor abuse, nor sickness, nor death, as it came to five of her children, had driven Mary Casey to anything like the poignancy of feeling that was hers now. Heretofore she had been patiently dumb under affliction; now her spirit cried out in a passion of pain that called straight upon Almighty God for an answer to its anguished questionings. With the aid of Casey, who was a "scollard," and could "r'ade 'n' write joost as aisy," she pored over the sensational papers in search of stories about girls in trouble, and never a horror happened to an unidentified girl anywhere but Mary was sure it was Angela Ann. Once there was an account of an unknown young woman found dead on the prairies near Dunning, the county institution. It was Johnnie who laboriously spelled out this story for her--Casey having gone to that club of congenial spirits, O'Shaughannessy's saloon--and at ten o'clock, when the children were all abed, her anxieties could brook no more delay. Throwing a shawl about her head and shoulders, she stole along the pitchy passageway, up the long flight of steps to the sidewalk, clutching the torn fragment of newspaper in the hand that held the shawl together beneath her chin. It was Saturday night, and the avenue was still brightly lighted. One or two acquaintances greeted her, but she hurried by with only a nod and a word. At Harrison and Halsted and Blue Island Avenue, where three streams of ceaseless activity converge, there is always a whirlpool rapids of traffic and humanity, and here, in a brilliant drug store, Mary felt far enough from her own haunts and all who knew her and Angela Ann to venture on her errand. "I want t' tillyphome," she whispered to the clerk, who pointed impatiently to the booth. "I dunno how," said Mary imploringly. "I want ye t' do it fer me. R'ade that." She thrust the dirty, crumpled fragment of the evening's yellow journal into his hand. The young man glanced at it, and then curiously at her. "I've read it," he said.