did drink he called for
stout.

The two girls stayed alone in the parlor with little heart to light the
gas, with little desire to talk over the mournful buzz which had filled
the house all day. The lodgers being gone, no responsibility of general
illumination rested with Jenny or May. Soon, however, they moved in
accord to the kitchen, where on each side of the glowing fire they
listened to the singing of a kettle and the tick of the American clock.
An insistent loneliness penetrated their souls. In that hour of sorrow
and twilight, they drew nearer to one another than ever before. Outside
a cat was wailing, and far down the road a dog, true to superstition,
howled at intervals. The kitchen was intolerably changed by Mrs.
Raeburn's absence. Jenny suddenly realized how lonely May must have been
during those weeks of illness and suspense. She herself had had the
distractions of the theater, but May must have moped away each heavy
moment.

"I wonder where Ruby is now?" said Jenny suddenly.

"Fancy! I wonder."

They sighed. The old house in Hagworth Street seemed, with the death of
its laughing mistress, to have lost its history, to have become merely
one of a dreary row.

"Oh, May, look," said Jenny. "There's her apron never even gone to the
wash."

After that the sisters wept quietly; while Venus dogged the young moon
down into the green West, and darkness shrouded the gray Islington
street.

Chapter XXXIII: _Loose Ends_

For all that Jenny was so contemptuous of her aunt's opinion at the time
of its expression, when she came to weigh its truth she found it
somewhat disturbing. Was an abscess, indeed, the sole cause of her
mother's madness and death? And could Aunt Mabel have any justification
for so cruelly hinting at a less obvious cause? Jenny herself possessed
a disconcerting clarity of intuition which she inherited from her
mother, who might have divined the progress of the Danby incident and
brooded over it too profoundly in the absence of her daughter. Indeed,
she might have been actually goaded into sheer madness by a terrible
consciousness of that rainy St. Valentine's night; for it was strange
that her sanity should fly forever on the very next morning. It was
horrid to think that all night long her mother, kept awake by pain,
might have been conscious of her actions. Yet the doctor had so
confidently blamed the abscess for everything. Moreover, in the asylum
her mother had seemed just as mu