In partnership with her clergyman and her solicitor, she was drawing plans and making contracts for the building of a free school for colored people on her plantation, and also for a sanatorium for destitute children and invalids on her seaside estate, the Isle of Storms.
“Squandering her fortune in that mad manner!” exclaimed Hanson, in disgust, forgetting that he himself squandered ten times as much in yachting, racing, gambling and more objectionable pursuits. “So much for trusting women with wealth. She ought to have a trustee appointed by the courts to take care of her estates. If I were her next of kin, I know what I would do. I would soon stop her mad career.”
The next news he heard from his spy was to the effect that Miss Fronde was going to Europe in August.
“She is, is she? Then I will go on the same ship and take the child with me,” said Hanson to himself; and he wrote back to his man to remain in the neighborhood until Miss Fronde should leave it for New York, and to come on the same train with her and report to him. And if the peddler wanted a new stock of goods to keep him going Hanson would send them.
“I shall see you on the ship, my lady. You can’t get away from me.”
Meanwhile Owlet had safely passed the crisis of her illness, and was recovering slowly, very slowly. Her return to consciousness was very gradual and intermittent.
Though she was gathering some strength of body, she remained strangely feeble in intellect. She seemed to have forgotten the details of her abduction, but not the existence of her dear “Lady.” She begged piteously to be taken back to her “darling Lady.”
She was promised that she should go to her Lady as soon as she should be well enough to travel, and so she was put off from time to time.
Hanson told the nurse and the doctor that the lady she talked so much about had been her nursery governess, to whom she had been much attached; advised her to humor the child, yet warned her to try to divert Owlet’s attention from the subject.
But that was quite impossible. “Lady” was the one absorbing subject of her thoughts by day, and of her dreams by night.