"Don't talk to me of love—please don't!" cried Kathleen, keeping her ardent lover at bay with two entreating white hands.
"Well, I won't—at least not to-day; and I beg your pardon, dear, if I've intruded on your grief with my selfish love. But I thought—thought it might please you to know that there was one who loved you even better since your reverse of fortune than before," Teddy explained, humbly.
"You are too good to me," she repeated as before, incoherently, touched by his devotion, and contrasting it in her mind with the treachery of that other one so dearly loved, so deeply false.
"Then may I hope, Kathleen?"
"Oh, no, no, no! I shall never love nor marry any one!" she answered, vehemently; but Teddy Darrell did not in the least believe her. He thought that all young girls were sure to love some day, and almost certain to marry. He determined to keep on hoping and trying to win this peerless beauty.
Kathleen guessed what his thoughts were, and it made her very uneasy.
"If I remain here with his cousin he will expect me to marry him," she thought. "I can not do it, for I do not love him. I must go away again;" and that very day she wrote to her mother's relatives in Richmond—the ones to whom she was going when overtaken by such an awful fate at Lincoln Station.
Kathleen was so weak that it tired her now even to write a letter, and the pen dragged wearily before she finished the recital of her sorrows, and pleaded with these unknown kin to let her come to them just for a little while—until she was strong enough to go out into the wide, cruel world and earn her own living with those weak, white hands.