Of the nature of Guy's reply she had no doubt. He had loved her once, he loved her still, and he would take her back of course. There was no truth in that rumor of another marriage. Possibly her father, whom she understood now better than she once did, had gotten the story up for the sake of inducing her through pique to marry Tom; but if so, his plan would fail. Guy would write to her, "Come!" and she should go, and more than once she counted the contents of her purse and added to it the sum due her from Madame Lafarcade, and wondered if she would dare venture on the journey with so small a sum.
"You so happy and white, too, this morning," her little pupil, Pauline, said to her one day, when they sat together in the garden, and Daisy was indulging in a fanciful picture of her meeting with Guy.
"Yes, I am happy," Daisy said, rousing from her revery; "but I did not know I was pale, or white, as you term it, though, now I think of it, I do feel sick and faint. It's the heat, I suppose. Oh! there is Max, with the mail! He is coming this way! He has,—he certainly has something for me!"
Daisy's cheeks were scarlet now, and her eyes were bright as stars as she went forward to meet the man who brought the letters to the house.
"Only a paper!—is there nothing more?" she asked, in an unsteady voice, as she took the paper in her hand, and recognizing Guy's handwriting, knew almost to a certainty what was before her.
"Oh, you are sick, I must bring some water," Pauline exclaimed, alarmed at Daisy's white face and the peculiar tone of her voice.
"No, Pauline, stay; open the paper for me," Daisy said, feeling that it would be easier so than to read it herself, for she knew what was there, else he would never have sent her a paper and nothing more.
Delighted to be of some use, and a little gratified to open a foreign paper, Pauline tore off the wrapper, starting a little at Daisy's quick, sharp cry as she made a rent across the handwriting.
"Look, you are tearing into my name, which he wrote," Daisy said, and then remembering herself she sank back into her seat in the garden chair, while Pauline wondered what harm there was in tearing an old soiled wrapper, and why her governess should take it so carefully in her hand and roll it up as if it had been a living thing.
There were notices of new books, and a runaway match in high life, and a suicide on Sumner street, and a golden wedding in Roxbury, and the latest fashions from Paris, into which Pauline plunged with avidity, while Daisy listened like one in a dream, asking, when the fashions were exhausted, "Is that all? Are there no deaths or marriages?"