Mischievous Maid Faynie

by Laura Jean Libbey

"It is false!" shrieked Kendale. "The girl I married in the old church is dead—dead, I tell you. I—I saw her buried with my own eyes!"

"She is not dead, for I am that unfortunate girl," answered Faynie, in a voice that trembled with agonized emotion.

"Listen all, while I tell my story," she sobbed. "Surely the saddest, most pitiful story a young girl ever had to tell."

Then, in a panting voice, she told her horrified listeners all, from the beginning to the very end, omitting not the slightest detail, dwelling with a pathos that brought tears to every eye, of how she had loved him up to the very hour he had come for her to elope with him; her horror and fear of him growing more intense because of the marriage he forced her into, with the concealed revolver pressed so close to her heart she dared not disobey his slightest command.

And how the conviction grew upon her that he was marrying her for wealth only, and the inspiration that came to her to test his so-called love by telling him that she had been disinherited, though she was confident that her father had made his will in her favor, leaving her his entire fortune.

Dwelling with piteous sobs on how he had then and there struck her down to death, as he supposed, and that he had made all haste to make away with her; and that she would at that moment have been lying in an unmarked grave, under the snowdrifts, if Heaven had not most miraculously interfered and saved her.

Faynie ended her thrilling recital by adding that she had not known, until that hour, that this man was Claire's lover, because they had refrained from mentioning the name of the man in her presence. How she had come to the library in search of a book and had encountered him stealing through the halls, a veritable thief in the dead of the night, bent upon securing a sum of money which he had learned in some way was in the safe, and that he now had it in his pocket, and that she had prevented him from securing her father's will by snatching it from his grasp.

Mrs. Fairfax had fallen back, trembling like an aspen leaf. She recognized her husband's will in Faynie's hands, and that, although the girl did not say so before the servants, she knew her treachery.

"Come, Claire, my child," she said, turning to her daughter, "this is no place for you."

But Claire did not stir; she stood quite still, looking from the one to the other, as though she could not fully comprehend all that she saw and heard.