CHAPTER V. A PERSISTENT SUITOR.

A PERSISTENT SUITOR.

Belva Platt did not find it as easy to force her recreant lover back to her feet as she had expected.

Waverley Osborne was a good-looking, clever young man, with a good opinion of himself, and his love for the handsome blonde had taken flight the first time he beheld the piquant face of Fair Fielding.

Although deeply disappointed and indignant at the treatment he had received at the hands of Fair and her mother, he had by no means given up the hope of winning the young girl’s regard. He was conceited, and he made up his mind that Fair only repulsed him through fear of her mother.

“She would go with me fast enough only for that old cat, who wants to keep her daughter from getting married that she may support her in her laziness,” he said angrily to himself, and he made up his mind not to cease his attentions to Fair, but to conduct them more cautiously, so[Pg 44] that he might make an impression on her girlish heart and induce her to meet him clandestinely, since her mother was opposed to his suit.

[Pg 44]

So he began to write her surreptitious love letters, which he conveyed to her hands by means of the little boys about the establishment, generally as she was leaving the factory after her day’s work was done.

Pretty Fair opened the first two of these epistles, and, finding them filled with praises of her beauty and protestations of love, returned both to the writer, with a curt message that she desired nothing to do with him.

But Waverley Osborne told himself that these were but the coquetries of a pretty young girl, who adopted these coy repulses only to lead him on. So he persevered, and every day sent her a fresh letter, which she, with resentful haste, returned, unopened, so that Belva Platt, who was watching her lover’s movements in Fair’s direction very closely, one day secured one of these letters by bribing a little messenger boy, and forthwith possessed herself of the tender contents.

The fury of the girl whose love had been slighted and rejected for a rival knew no bounds.

[Pg 45]

[Pg 45]

“I could kill them both!” she said savagely, through her clenched teeth, as she paced restlessly 

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