Jack Wren having been furnished by Uncle Ben with a photograph of Kathleen, suddenly chanced upon a face that made him think he had found the missing girl.
It was a face at the window of a little cottage in the suburbs of the city—a beautiful face, dark-eyed, golden-haired, with piquant features, so close a copy of Kathleen's that the detective was startled. He consulted the photograph closely, and it seemed to him that the description answered in every particular. So he congratulated himself that he had been mistaken in his theory that Kathleen was dead.
"But why did they leave her alive, and what is she doing here?" he asked himself in wonder.
He made some cautious inquiries among the neighbors, and he found that the beautiful young girl was a governess in the family of a young lawyer who occupied the cottage. His wife was an invalid, and had employed the young girl to fill the position of nursery governess to her five tow-headed boys, "the worst limbs in the whole neighborhood," averred the gossiping neighbors.
The new governess Daisy Lynn, as she called herself, had only been there three weeks, they said, and they were sure she would not stay the month out. No one could endure that Perkins tribe more than a month. The oldest boy was twelve, the youngest only four. "But," said the grocery man at the corner, "from the biggest to the littlest, they are all imps of Satan!"
"But why did the girl come here? why does she stay? Evidently she is here of her own free will," thought the puzzled detective.
He made up his mind to a bold procedure: he would go and see the girl.
He rang the bell at the door, and a slatternly negro girl opened it and started at the elegant-looking caller with his shiny hat.
"I want to see Miss Lynn," he said; and she showed him into the little parlor, and went to call the governess.