Ailsa wept most bitterly, for she feared that it would be long ere she saw Dainty's sweet face again.
"She thinks I have forsaken her, and she will be too proud to let me know where she is," she thought.
Then came the startling discovery of the personals offering a reward for news of Dainty Chase, and of the marriage license that had been granted to her and Love Ellsworth.
Ailsa hunted up the back numbers of the newspapers, and found that the personals had been running more than a week, and that they were inserted in all the city journals.
She thought:
"Fidelio—that means faithful—so it must be some dear friend of Dainty's that wants to find her so badly—perhaps her husband; for I am bound to believe she was secretly married. So I will write to Fidelio, and tell him all I know of the dear girl's fate."
On the same day, almost the same hour, a pretty, sad-faced woman at the insane asylum in Staunton sat reading the same personals in some newspapers the matron had given her that morning.
It was Mrs. Chase, and a great change had come over the sweet little woman. In fact, the doctors and attendants declared that she was quite well of her suicidal mania, and that at the next meeting of the board of directors, on the twentieth of April, her discharge would be asked for as a cured woman. Every one would be sorry to see her go, she was so gentle and refined and helpful now, and the violence of her first sorrow had subsided into patient, uncomplaining resignation.
But the strangest thing about her was that she did not seem to have a friend in the world. No one ever came to see her or wrote to inquire how she was. They wondered where she would go when she was discharged.
One of the new supervisors, a pale, middle-aged woman in widow's weeds, passed through the ward when Mrs. Chase was reading the papers, and found her weeping violently. She stopped, and asked kindly what was the matter.