CHAPTER III.

THE WHEELS OF FATE.

Two days afterward a shabby little chemist in a shabby shop on the Euston road looked carelessly at a strange customer.

A tall, big-boned girl in a frock too short for her had asked for laudanum for a toothache. She looked half-wild with pain--or despair; the chemist never thought of the latter, and he sold her some. Her face grew livid as he pushed a book toward her and requested her to sign her name. It was always done, he explained, when people bought poisons.

With a frightened hand she scrawled something, but the name was so outlandish to the man as he stood peering at it that he never noticed with what haste his customer had left the shop. She had been a fool ever to have entered it, yet in the new and dreadful knowledge that two days of London streets had crowded on her she had felt there was nothing else to do.

Perhaps her very innocence of the world had made her pass scatheless through perils she only half-realized, but that half was enough. Behind her lay the convent, and she could never go back to that; round her were the awful streets where policemen kept hurrying her on, where people passed her indifferent-eyed, or else--Beryl Corselas turned sick and faint at the thought of those other people who had not passed on.

Her money had been stolen, all but the few shillings she had put in the bodice of her frock, and when that was done, what in all the world remained to her? No one had ever liked her. She had no belief in any one’s charity, and the girl’s heart swelled as she answered her own question.

“Only just death,” she thought, fingering the little bottle of laudanum she had been forced to sign her name to get, “or Mother Felicitas--for she’ll trace me by it. Well, I’d rather die out here than live in the convent.” She had walked on aimlessly enough, and looked up to see that she was in front of the entrance to a railway-station, where people kept going in and out. With a sudden inspiration she followed a woman inside, and stood behind her at the booking-office. A train was waiting, ready to leave; on the carriage nearest her was a sign, “For Blackpool.” She knew where that was, even with her badly learned geography lessons; it was a long way off from London and Mother Felicitas.

She bought a second-class ticket, imitating the woman in front of her. At least she could rest in the train, since her tired feet would hardly carry her. She had no money at all when she had paid for her ticket, and could just manage to follow a porter and stumble into the carriage marked Blackpool.

To her joy no one else entered it, and the train started.

The cushioned carriage was rapture to her tired body, but before she stretched herself out on its scant luxury, she drained the little bottle the chemist had sold her, and threw it away. Then she curled herself up and slept; at first uneasily, with the unaccustomed sounds of the moving train in her dreams, and then heavily, as people sleep themselves to death.

There was no peace in the world for such as she, and at sixteen Beryl Corselas had found it out. She had tried to get employment, but the women at whose doors she had knocked wanted no such unearthly-looking nursemaids, and she could do nothing else. To sleep her life away was all she could do, and there would be plenty of time for that between London and Blackpool.

Remorselessly as the wheels of fate the train rolled on, and dreamlessly the girl slept.

If she had known two things she might have flung the laudanum from her like a snake. The first was that Andria Heathcote had been longing for her, yet not daring to visit her in the safe refuge of the convent. The second, that if Mother Felicitas had known that her missing pupil had gone to Blackpool she would have laughed silently, since that was the only part of England Beryl Corselas had to avoid. But in ignorance and despair the girl had drugged herself till a creepy warmth was in her veins, and so, bound and helpless, would deliver herself to a worse than Mother Felicitas, unless Death, like a quiet friend, called her before such things could be.