dumb. And she might have succeeded in making herself salable through
incipient lunacy, if through no other way, had she been able to
maintain her role long enough. But some woman or baby always was
falling into some emergency of pain and illness.

How it might have ended one does not like to think. Fortunately, one
does not need to think.

There came a night. She sat alone in the vast, dark caravansary--alone
for the first time in her life. Empty rags and blankets lay strewn
over the floor, no snoring, no tossing in them more. A sacrificial
sale that day had cleared the counters. Alarm-bells rang in the
streets, but she did not know them for alarm-bells; alarm brooded in
the dim space around her, but she did not even recognize that. Her
protracted tension of heart had made her fear-blind to all but one
peradventure.

Once or twice she forgot herself, and limped over to some heap to
relieve an imaginary struggling babe or moaning sleeper. Morning came.
She had dozed. She looked to see the rag-heaps stir; they lay as still
as corpses. The alarm-bells had ceased. She looked to see a new gang
enter the far door. She listened for the gathering buzzing of voices
in the next room, around the auction-block. She waited for the trader.
She waited for the janitor. At nightfall a file of soldiers entered.
They drove her forth, ordering her in the voice, in the tone, of
the negro-trader. That was the only familiar thing in the chaos of
incomprehensibility about her. She hobbled through the auction-room.
Posters, advertisements, papers, lay on the floor, and in the
torch-light glared from the wall. Her Jacob's ladder, her
stepping-stone to her hopes, lay overturned in a corner.