Rose had never found out what it was her father had intended to give her for her birthday, or what he had intended to give Jimmy. There had been times — once or twice, anyway — that he had made a deposit on whatever it was he wanted and then the people in the shop would put the present, the toy or the doll, away until he had the money to pay for it in full. Rose could not believe that he had not put down a deposit on something for her someplace; not on the present for Jimmy, perhaps, because that would have been smaller, but on something for her. And she went in and out of Miss Greene’s shop several times, and in and out of O’Malley’s, loitering a minute and looking around and hoping that one or another of the people behind the counter would say to her that her father had made a deposit on something for her and that they had it there, keeping it for her, but nobody ever said anything to her about a deposit being made, and she was afraid to ask.

But it was not the loss of the present or the loss of the birthday or even the loss of her father that afflicted Rose so much as the knowledge, which she alone possessed, of that lost fragment of time between the moment of his death and the moment that had marked her birth. A big piece of time had been broken off, and it had gone down, and maybe it had taken others besides him with it, but if it had she did not know of them. The terrible thing was that no one besides herself seemed to notice that a piece of time, a fragment, had been shattered off their lives, and that nothing had happened during that time — no minutes or hours or anything like that. It was on that uneven fragment of time that Rose concentrated her attention, trying to guess its shape (not exactly like a day, and not exactly like a night) and trying to imagine what accident had caused it to slip away when it might have held firm until she and her father had gained the safe ground of her birthday. It was her knowledge of the power of accident, and her natural, confused apprehension, as much as the desire to see that he got something to eat, that had caused her to trick Hubert into coming downstairs this morning, when she knew perfectly well that he was enjoying his sulk.

She was just in time for Mass. As she walked into the church she held herself very straight, and her face wore a self-conscious, almost disdainful look, the look of one who has found nothing to criticize so far but who fears that at any moment she may find herself among people who are beneath her and who will try to be too familiar with her.