Sarah supposed this was a good way to deal with grief. She liked to think of Tom as living happily in the hereafter. It had never been enough to make her content to live without him, however. “I suppose Emilia had a very unhappy life before she came here,” she ventured, hoping to allow Mrs. Wells an opportunity to tell her about the girl in whom she had invested so much effort. As Sarah knew, talking about the deceased helped ease the pain of loss. Not to mention, she might reveal some useful information in the process.

“Her family was no worse than most, I suppose,” Mrs. Wells said, not looking at Sarah. She seemed to be speaking more to herself, lost in her own memories. “The Italians are of an emotional temperament, as I’m sure you know. Emilia was a sensitive girl. She suffered more than most under her parents’ inability to control themselves. I’m afraid that made her easy prey for the wrong kind of man.”

“You mentioned that she had been seduced by a man who wouldn’t marry her,” Sarah reminded her.

“Emilia wasn’t his first conquest, I’m afraid. He promised her marriage, but he had no intention of keeping that promise. Why should he when Emilia had already granted him every privilege of marriage without it?”

Sarah had heard this same story many times, innocent girls betrayed by faithless lovers.

“How did she come to the mission?” Sarah asked.

Mrs. Wells sighed. “The first time she was desperate. When her lover refused to marry her, she had enough self-respect left to leave him, but her parents refused to take her back. She’d disgraced them, they said. As if people like that had any honor to begin with.”

Her contempt was probably well deserved, Sarah thought. People who turned a child away were despicable. “So she came to the mission?” Sarah guessed.

“Not then,” Mrs. Wells said with a sigh. “She allowed herself to be deceived by yet another man who was even worse than the first one. This one forced her to… to sell herself in the streets.”