She went slowly, wearily, lugging her half-empty hand-hag as if it were a heavy burden.
At length, leaving the avenue, she paused a few doors west of the corner, climbed the weather-bitten steps to the brownstone entrance, and addressed herself to those three long flights of naked stairs.
The studio door at the top was closed and locked. The card had been torn from the tacks that held it to the panel.
Puzzled and anxious, she stopped and turned up a corner of the worn fibre mat--and sighed with relief to find the key in its traditional hiding-place.
But when she let herself in, it was to a room tenanted solely by seven howling devils of desolation.
Only the decrepit furniture remained; it had not been worth cartage or storage; every personal belonging of the other two girls had disappeared; Mary Warden had not left so much as a sheet of music, Lucy Spade had overlooked not so much as a hopeless sketch.
Yet Sally had no cause for complaint; they had forsaken her less indifferently than she had them; one or the other had left a newspaper, now three days old, propped up where she could not fail to see it on the antiquated marble mantel-shelf. In separate columns on the page folded outermost two items were encircled with rings of crimson water-colour.
One, under the caption "News of Plays and Players," noted the departure for an opening in Atlantic City of the musical comedy company of whose chorus Mary Warden was a member.
The other, in the column headed "Marriages," announced tersely the nuptials of Lucy Spode and Samuel W. Meyerick. No details were given.
Forlornly Sally wandered to the windows and opened them to exchange the hot air of the studio for the hotter air of the back yards.
Then slowly she set about picking up the threads of her life.
Such clothing as she owned offered little variety for choice. She selected the least disreputable of two heavy, black winter skirts, a shirt-waist badly torn at the collar-band, her severely plain under-clothing, coarse black stockings, and shoes that had been discarded as not worth another visit to the cobbler's.
When these had been exchanged for the gifts of Mrs. Standish, Sally grimly packed the latter into the hand-bag and shut the latch upon them with a snap of despair.