foolish husband, and there would be little satisfaction in that! They had already arrived at a stage in their downward progress when not gold, or even silver, but bare copper, was lacking as the equivalent for the bread that could but keep them alive until the next rousing of the hunger that even now lay across their threshold. And how could she, in her all but absolute poverty, do anything? Her mother was but one pace or so from the same goal, and would, as a mother must, interfere to prevent her useless postponement of the inevitable. It was clear she could do nothing—and yet she could ill consent that it should be so.
When her father almost suddenly left them alone, Annie was already acting as assistant in the Girls’ High School—but, alas! without any recognition of her services by even a promise of coming payment. She lived only in the hope of a small salary, dependent on her definite appointment to the office. To attempt to draw upon this hope would be to imperil the appointment itself. She could not, even for her friend, risk her mother’s prospects, already poor enough; and she could not help perceiving the hopelessness of her friend’s case, because of the utter characterlessness of the husband to whom she was enslaved. Why interfere with the hunger he would do nothing to forestall? How could she even give such a man the sixpence which had been her father’s last gift to her?
But Annie was one to whom, in the course of her life, something strange had not unfrequently happened, chiefly in the shape of what the common mind would set aside as mere coincidence. I do not say “many” such things had occurred in her life; but, together, their strangeness and their recurrence had caused her to remember every one of them, so that, when she reviewed them, they seemed to her many. And now, with a shadowy prevision, as it seemed, that something was going to happen, and with a shadowy recollection that she had known beforehand it was coming, something strange did take place. Of such things she used, in after days, always to employ the old, stately Bible-phrase, “It came to pass”; she never said, “It happened.”