Mary had come back disheartened from a fruitless quest. Maggie had indeed been at Poughkeepsie, and had spent a day and a night with a widowed sister of Mary's, and then, following a restless impulse, had gone back to New York--none knew whither; and Mary was going on with her duties with that quiet, acquiescent sadness with which people of her class bear sorrow which they have no leisure to indulge. The girl had for two or three years been lost to her; but the brief interval of restoration seemed to have made the pang of losing her again still more dreadful. Then, the anticipated mortification of having to tell Mike of it, and the thought of what Mike and Mike's wife's would say, were a stinging poison. Though Maggie's flight was really due in a great measure to Mike's own ungracious reception of her and his harsh upbraidings, intensified by what she had overheard from Mrs. Wouvermans, yet Mary was quite sure that Mike would receive it as a confirmation of his own sagacity in the opinion he had pronounced.
The hardness and apathy with which even near relations will consign their kith and kin to utter ruin is one of the sad phenomena of life. Mary knew that Mike would say to her, "Didn't I tell you so? The girl's gone to the bad; let her go! She's made her bed; let her lie in it."
It was only from her gentle, sympathetic mistress that Mary met with a word of comfort. Eva talked with her, and encouraged her to pour out all her troubles and opened the door of her own heart to her sorrows. Eva cheered and comforted her all she could, though she had small hopes, herself.
She had told Mr. Fellows, she said, and Mr. Fellows knew all about New York--knew everybody and everything--and if Maggie were there he would be sure to hear of her; "and if she is anywhere in New York I will go to her," said Eva, "and persuade her to come back and be a good girl. And don't you tell your brother anything about it. Why need he know? I dare say we shall get Maggie back, and all going right, before he knows anything about it."
Eva had just been talking to this effect to Mary in the kitchen, and she came back into her parlor, to find there poor, fluttering, worried little Mrs. Betsey Benthusen, who had come in to bewail her prodigal son, of whom, for now three days and nights, no tidings had been heard.