write to each other. They had just finished their evening meal when the telegram arrived, and Sadie had quitted the house within half an hour of its reception, to catch the first train for Philadelphia. Consequently Fair would have to spend a long, dreary night alone before any of her friends at the factory could possibly come to her assistance. A strange sense of awe and loneliness came over her when she had shut and locked the room door after Sadie. She had never spent a night alone in her life, and although it seemed that she must certainly be safe in the large building, crowded with honest working people like herself, she felt nervous and fearful. [Pg 94] [Pg 94] CHAPTER XII. A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE. A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE. Fair read a book until ten o’clock, but the feeling of rest and security she longed for did not come. Every now and then she would start and flash her large eyes about the room and heave long sighs at its emptiness and loneliness. Then she began to wonder how far Sadie was on her way to Philadelphia. Again she would sigh and wish her friend back, and at last her thoughts turned to the poor mother, of whom she had been so suddenly and cruelly bereaved. “He killed her just as truly as if he had stabbed her to the heart,” she murmured bitterly. “Ah, how I hate him, how I loathe the very thought of him! Yet I am powerless to punish him for his dastardly crime.” She did not guess that by her scorn of him, her refusal to live with him, and her precautions against him, she was punishing him in the cruelest fashion for his sins, for the poor tool that Belva had used to further her designs against[Pg 95] Fair had fallen in love with his fate, and worshiped her with a fierce, half-savage passion that drove him wild with its futility. [Pg 95] To win the heart of the beautiful girl he had deceived, he would have bartered his hopes of heaven; but, in her
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