Page:True stories of girl heroines.djvu/202

174 put the old faith in them. Her heart was heavy as lead within her. She was revolving many plans by which she might still earn something and support her mother. But the price of food was rising so fearfully that already she scarcely knew how to keep the wolf from the door; she knew, too, that her mother desired, if possible, not to be forced to send for the doled-out rations from the great Government building; and no one could more desire to be spared the task of fetching it daily than Theresa herself.

She had heard what that meant from others. The long, long, weary wait in the daily increasing crowd; the hustling and the jostling before one could get a place in the queue; the bitter cold often to be faced when the wind blew down upon the crowd; the peril, sometimes, of having the hardly earned food snatched away in some back street by a hungry ragamuffin before ever it had reached its destination.

All this Theresa knew that she would have to face if they lost all other means of support. And, moreover, for her was another great danger: to reach the quarter of the city where the food was doled out, she would be forced to cross a wide boulevard that was swept from end to end by the guns of a battery, and each time that she went she would have to take her life in her hands, as it were.

"But mother must never know that," she said to herself, as she thought of these things. "She is fearful