"Oliver; Ruth Oliver."
Again I thought of the O. R. on the clothes at the laundry.
"I wish I could see her," I ventured. "I would give anything for a peep at her face unobserved."
"I don't know how I can manage that; she is very shy, and never shows herself in the front of the house. She even dines in her own room, having begged for that privilege till after I was married and the household settled on a new basis. But you can go to her room with me. If she is all right, she can have no objection to a visitor; and if she is not, it would be well for me to know it at once."
"Certainly," said I, and rose to follow her, turning over in my mind how I should account to this young woman for my intrusion. I had just arrived at what I considered a sensible conclusion, when Miss Althorpe, leaning towards me, said with a whole-souled impetuosity for which I could not but admire her:
"The girl is very nervous, she looks and acts like a person who has had some frightful shock. Don't alarm her, Miss Butterworth, and don't accuse her of anything wrong too suddenly. Perhaps she is innocent, and perhaps if she is not innocent, she has been driven into evil by very great temptations. I am sorry for her, whether she is simply unhappy or deeply remorseful. For I never saw a sweeter face, or eyes with such boundless depths of misery in them."
Just what Mrs. Desberger had said! Strange, but I began to feel a certain sort of sympathy for the wretched being I was hunting down.
"I will be careful," said I. "I merely want to satisfy myself that she is the same girl I heard of last from a Mrs. Desberger."
Miss Althorpe, who was now half-way up the rich staircase which makes her house one of the most remarkable in the city, turned and gave me a quick look over her shoulder.
"I don't know Mrs. Desberger," she remarked.