[CHAPTER XXXI.]
KATHLEEN'S WEARY WAITING.
Oh! you tangled my life in your hair;
'Twas a silken and golden snare,
But so gentle the bondage my soul did implore
The right to continue your slave evermore.
Miles O'Reilly.
Teddy Darrell sent up a doctor to see Kathleen, and he was startled when he found that the young girl was suffering from arsenical poisoning.
"It is quite well that you sent for me, because if this had gone any further, she might have died. But I will go at once to work to remove the effects of the poison from her system," Doctor Spicer said, gravely.
Mrs. Stone was shocked, but she readily comprehended that the woman Fedora had placed the deadly drug in Kathleen's food, intending to compass her death by slow degrees. What mystified her was the woman's motive.
Kathleen, while confiding the rest of her harrowing story to these kind friends, Teddy Darrell and his cousin, had withheld the story of Ralph Chainey's connection with her trouble. She could not bring herself to mention his name. Something in her heart pleaded mutely for the culprit. What if the woman had lied to her? What if she had been lured from Ralph by a cunning ruse? Her brain reeled sometimes with this suspicion, and she felt that she should go mad with the miserable uncertainty of it all. Where was Ralph? Oh, if she could only see him—find out the real truth!
So she did not tell her friends anything about Ralph, and Mrs. Stone had no clew to the mystery of this attempt on her life.
"She does not dream of it, and perhaps it will be as well not to tell her, she has already suffered so much through her unknown foes," thought the kind lady.