Sadie’s telegram was a bogus one, sent to draw her faithful friend away from her side.

“For how else could that wretch ever have known so quickly of her absence?” she thought.

Mrs. Burns stayed with her again that night, but Fair feared to tell the kind soul of her secret dread; consequently she had no one to accompany her to work, and she stayed at home several days through sheer terror of venturing out.

Then a new danger began to menace her. The grim fiend, Hunger, was at her door.

Always subsisting on meager fare, the two girls had been wont to purchase their eatables day by day, as they returned from work. Fair had had but a few pennies in her purse when Sadie left, and all these were gone now. She had sent the little Burns girl out every day to purchase bread[Pg 106] for her, but now pennies and bread were alike exhausted. Fair had been without food two days.

[Pg 106]

If she had made known her wretched condition to the people in the house, they would have divided their scanty portion with the unhappy orphan girl; but her lips were sealed. She had some of her dead mother’s unconquerable pride. She could not beg.

“I must perish miserably, like a rat in a trap!” she exclaimed, in anguish of spirit; and so wretched and despondent had she become that she would have welcomed death as a relief from her deplorable condition.

Oh, those wretched days, those sleepless nights, and that knawing hunger—how they wore on the fresh young beauty, paling and thinning it to exquisite delicacy. The large eyes grew dim and wide, and the tears were always trembling on the exquisitely fringed lashes. She wrote much in the little journal those days, and the thoughts she inscribed there were so full of sadness that they must have brought tears to “eyes unused to weep.”

It was on the third day since she had tasted food that her landlady came up to speak to her,[Pg 107] and Fair’s pale face grew paler yet as she noticed the hard light in the woman’s face and the set line of her lips.

[Pg 107]

“Miss Fielding, I’ve heard a curious tale about you, and I want to know the truth,” she said shortly. “It seems like the man that was in your room that night was your husband, after all.”

“Who has been telling you these 

 Prev. P 50/141 next