"Reba will always do your errands for you," she said; and Kathleen had to relinquish them reluctantly to the maid.
Reba had her instructions, and while Kathleen watched her from the window, she cleverly pushed some scraps of papers into the letter-box on the corner, and carried the letters back to Miss Watts, who locked them into her private desk.
"It is strange what a fad she has taken into her head!" she thought, carelessly.
Kathleen waited with burning impatience for the answers to come to her letters. She counted the hours it would take for them to go from Philadelphia to Boston.
Meanwhile, almost unconsciously to herself, she began to take an interest in the absent girl whose place she had taken in the asylum, and in this small, neat home, so different from the splendor to which she had always been accustomed.
The little room she occupied, although not luxurious and grand like her own in her father's mansion on Commonwealth Avenue, was a perfect bower of maidenly innocence and sweet, loving fancies. The windows were curtained with white lace looped with rosy ribbons; the brass bedstead had a white lace canopy; the toilet-table, the lounge, the low chairs, all repeated the pretty fashion of white lace and rose-pink ribbons, and the floor was covered with a light-hued carpet strewn with ferns. Pretty little pictures adorned the mantel and the walls, and the daintiest kind of a dressing-case was displayed on the toilet-table. In the drawers were girlish trifles, such as young girls gather about them, and there was, too, a pretty little diary, at which Kathleen glanced with tender interest, wondering what was written on those pages, penned by the hand of a fair young girl, who had gone mad for love.
"But it would not be right to read it," she said at first, and would not touch it, until her loneliness, added to her interest in poor, missing Daisy Lynn, decided her that it would be no harm to read the diary.
She opened it, and a man's photograph fell out into her hands. She gazed at it with eager curiosity, exclaiming:
"This must be the false wretch that drove poor Daisy Lynn to madness!"