She waited for an answer, but none came. Kathleen's head had drooped on her breast. A fatal unconsciousness had stolen over her, and the hour of her enemy's triumph was at hand.
The blonde beauty laughed low and maliciously, as she realized how deeply her words had struck their poisoned arrows into the young girl's heart.
Coolly signaling a stranger who had hurriedly entered the almost deserted waiting-room, she said:
"My friend has fainted from grief at receiving a telegram containing news of the death of her lover. Will you assist me to carry her out to my carriage before she revives? I know she will go into hysterics as soon as she recovers, and that would be so embarrassing in this public place."
The gentleman, a slight-built, genial-faced man of about thirty years, courteously acceded to her request, and gazed with deep compassion at the beautiful face of the unconscious girl he was carrying in his arms.
"What a lovely creature! and so young—scarcely more than a child; yet she had a lover, and he is dead," he thought, pityingly, as he placed her in the carriage.
"I thank you for your kindness," said the blonde beauty, with a dazzling smile. The carriage door closed upon her after she had said "Home" to the driver, and then Samuel Hall, the kind-hearted, smiling-faced young man, stood under the gas-light, gazing after them with dazed blue eyes.
"Quite an adventure, Sammy, was it not, eh?" he muttered, talking naïvely to himself. Perhaps his arms thrilled yet with the pressure of the beautiful form that had lain heavily in them a minute ago. His mild blue eyes looked soft and dreamy.
"How lovely she was!" he mused. "So lovely and so sorrow-stricken! The other one was handsome, too, in her way, but not like the younger. Grand, rich people, I suppose," he ended with a sigh; for, having once known "better days," our friend "Sammy" did not very much enjoy his position as a hard-working clerk in one of Philadelphia's immense dry-goods emporiums.
He went home to his lonely room in a great, rambling boarding-house, and though he was not usually impressionable, his mind kept running on his little adventure. He said to himself that it was because he was so sorry for the beautiful young girl who had fainted when she received the telegram that her lover was dead.