All is that one day in November of 1889, Addie arrived at the Church Street house with a forlorn parcel of a little girl and a bedraggled bag that contained her entire worldly possessions. She was ill and old. She would say little about her husband, but later it came out in the newspapers that William Scarp had been convicted of forgery and sent to prison in Indiana (where he died soon after of consumption contracted in prison). Addie had come back to the only human refuge she knew. She was too ill and too beaten by life to work. She sat around in the Church Street house dumbly for nearly a year, then died, leaving the forlorn, pale little girl to her brother and sister-in-law as a legacy. This child she had named Adelle, thus proving the persistence of her fancy even in her forlornest hours. Ada or Addie was too common for the last of the Clarks. She should at least have something poetic for name. For who could say? She might some day become an heiress and shine in that social firmament so much desired by her mother. In that event she should not be handicapped by a vulgar name. As Addie had resumed her maiden name after Scarp had been sent to prison, the little girl was destined to grow up as Adelle Clark,--the last member of the Alton branch of the Clarks, ultimate heiress to Clark's Field, should there be anything of it left to inherit when the law let go.
The silent little girl, who played about the lodgers' rooms in the dingy Church Street house, was of course unaware of the weight of expectation hanging to her. She was almost abnormally silent, perhaps because of her depressing prenatal experiences as well as the forlorn environment of the rooming-house,--perhaps because of physical and spiritual anæmia. "She's a puny mite of a child," Mrs. John Clark said complainingly, unpromising like everything Clark; nevertheless, the last of the sturdy yeoman stock of Clarks.
That "weight of expectation" hanging to the little girl was not quite as fantastic as might seem. It must be remembered that old Samuel before his death, in pressing need of ready money to finance some foolish venture of his son, had leased a good part of Clark's Field to some speculative builders, who had covered that portion of the old pasture that bordered the South Road with a leprous growth of cheap stores, which brought in a fair return. The leases ran up to the new century. Just why this precise term for the gambling venture had been chosen probably only the lawyers who made the arrangement could say. Possibly old Samuel had superstitious reasons for not pledging the family expectation beyond the present century. He may have thought that the turn of the century would bring about some profound change in the customs and habits of society that the family could take advantage of. At any rate, so it was. And it was not many years now to the close of the century when Clark's Field would be released to its original owners with all its shabby encumbrances.