equirements
of the next day and the following day and of all subsequent days
thronged upon her, clamoring for instant attention. The wraith of a
landlord sat on her bed demanding rent and threatening grisly
alternatives. Goblins that were bakers and butchers and grocers
grinned and leered and jabbered from the corners of the room.

Each day Mary Makebelieve went to the pawn office with something. They
lived for a time on the only capital they had--the poor furniture of
their room. Everything which had even the narrowest margin of value
was sold. Mary's dresses kept them for six days. Her mother's Sunday
skirt fed them for another day. They held famine at bay with a patchwork
quilt and a crazy washstand. A water-jug and a strip of oilcloth tinkled
momentarily against the teeth of the wolf and disappeared. The maw of
hunger was not incommoded by the window curtain.

At last the room was as bare as a desert and almost as uninhabitable.
A room without furniture is a ghostly place. Sounds made therein are
uncanny, even the voice puts off its humanity and rings back with a
bleak and hollow note, an empty resonance tinged with the frost of
winter. There is no other sound so deadly, so barren and dispiriting
as the echoes of an empty room. The gaunt woman in the bed seemed
less gaunt than her residence, and there was nothing more to be sent
to the pawnbroker or the secondhand dealer.

A post-card came from Mrs. O'Connor requesting, in a peremptory
language customary to such communications, that Mrs. Makebelieve would
please call on her the following morning before eight o'clock. Mrs.
Makebelieve groaned as she read it. It meant work and food and the
repurchase of her household goods, and she knew that on the following
morning she would not be able to get up. She lay a while thinking, and
then called her daughter.

"Deary," said she, "you will have to go to this place in the morning
and try what you can do. Tell Mrs. O'Connor that I am sick, and that
you are my daughter and will do the work, and try and do the best you
can for a while."

She caught her daughter's head down to her bosom and wept over her,
for she saw in this work a beginning and an end, the end of the
little daughter who could be petted and rocked and advised, the
beginning of a womanhood which would grow up to and beyond her, which
would collect and secrete emotions and aspirations and adventures not
to be shared even by a mother, and she saw the failure w