"Because it is a sin," replied the old lady, who was rigidly religious. "Have you forgotten," she continued, "the second commandment that you used to read every Lord's day at Sabbath-school?" and she repeated, solemnly:
"'Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth; thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them.'"
Kathleen stared in amazement at this liberal interpretation of the Scriptures, and retired regretting that she could not have the sad pleasure of gazing on the features of the unfortunate girl in whose fate her own was so strangely bound up.
"Poor, poor Daisy Lynn! I wonder what became of her when she escaped her keeper and wandered abroad that cold, dark night?" she mused; and she thought that the girl must be dead and at rest from her sorrows.
A long week of waiting elapsed, but no answer came to Kathleen's letters.
Kathleen grew desperate with suspense and trouble. She could no longer while away the dreary winter days by reading poor Daisy Lynn's novels, or playing sad melodies on her pretty little piano. She began to pace up and down the little room for long hours, revolving plans for escape from Miss Watts.
The three servants whom the old lady employed guarded the young girl, by the order of their mistress, as jealously as if she had been a convict in a penitentiary. All the doors were locked and guarded by burglar chains. She had appealed to their mercy in vain; and she was empty-handed and had nothing with which to bribe them. They had been told she was melancholy mad, and saw no reason to doubt the story. Her sad, white face, her beautiful dark eyes, in which the tears so often gathered, and her mournful little songs, all lent color to the charge.
Desperate emergencies require desperate remedies. Kathleen decided, in spite of Mrs. Hoover's warnings, to run away.
She had no money; but that did not deter her from her purpose. She would beg in the street for money to go to Boston before she would remain here any longer, she told herself, with a burst of tears.
Her old fear of her step-mother had died out in the conviction that her father had, of course, returned home ere now, and that, under his protection, no harm could befall his beloved child.