“Go back to work at the same place as that wicked Belva Platt? Oh, my dear, it will be so hard for you. And, besides, she will be laying some other wicked plot for you. Oh, I am afraid, afraid!” wailed the poor woman.

“I will have to be on my guard,” Fair answered, with a hard light in her sweet brown eyes.

She hated the wicked, unjust girl who had deceived[Pg 75] her so cruelly, and she knew that it would be hard to work with her in the same room again.

[Pg 75]

“But,” she went on, aloud, “there is no other way, unless I could get work somewhere else, and the chances are against me for that. I shall be glad if I can get back to the old place.”

“But the man? He will persecute you, dog your footsteps, perhaps,” said Mrs. Fielding, in a weak voice.

She looked very pale and ill as she lay back in the chair, her eyes half closed, her lips blue and drawn, some wisps of prematurely gray hair straggling over her marble-white brow. Fair put them back with loving fingers.

“You are very tired, aren’t you, dear?” she queried anxiously. “You worked too hard on your new dress to-day. Let me help you off with it, and put you to bed.”

“Water, please,” Mrs. Fielding gasped faintly.

She had turned livid about her lips, and before her daughter could obey the request her head fell back and she fainted.

“It is her heart again!” Fair cried. “Oh, it has been so long since she had one of these attacks![Pg 76] Those wretches have done this,” she went on bitterly, as she applied herself to the task of restoring her mother.

[Pg 76]

Mrs. Fielding had been subjected to these attacks, which her physician attributed to obscure heart trouble, but for several months she had not had any “spells,” as she called them, and Fair hoped she would get well of her disease, whatever it was; but, alas! the terrible shock she had received had precipitated another attack, and it was far into the night before she recovered sufficiently to lie down upon her pillow and fall into a troubled, restless slumber, while Fair, in a chair beside the bed, smoothed the damp white brow with soft, mesmeric fingers, and repressed her bursting sobs lest she should startle the unquiet sleeper.

“Poor darling, 

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