For with each day Kathleen grew weaker and weaker.
At first she had been wont to pace the chamber restlessly for hours. Now her limbs grew weary; her brain seemed to reel. She rested in the chair, then upon the bed, and her burning brain was full of the thought of Ralph Chainey's treachery.
"I loved him so, I loved him so—yet he was wicked, false and cruel beyond all men!" she sobbed; and the knowledge was killing to her. She thought that now, at last, she was going mad, like poor Daisy Lynn, over a lover's falsity.
She did not know that it was death, not madness, that was approaching; but the food brought her by Fedora was drugged, so that in a short time it must cause her death if she kept on taking it.
She did not dream what a terrible interest the woman had in her death, and that she had decided that Kathleen Carew must never go out of that house alive.
"He did it for me, and I must not let her go free," she decided, grimly, and went unfalteringly about her plans for ending that sweet, innocent young life.
Kathleen found her imprisonment here more galling than it had been in the home of Miss Watts. There was here no pretty, dainty room filled with a young girl's dainty books and pictures, but only squalor such as might have surrounded an uneducated servant.
She wondered much over the house she was in, and if her jailer, the gaudily attired blonde beauty, inhabited such a shabby apartment as she allotted to her guests. But she was not likely to have her curiosity gratified on this point, as Fedora always locked the door on leaving, and there was only one window—a small one, very high up—that gave an uninteresting outlook on the walls of other houses—poor ones, it seemed, from their moldy bricks.
A day came when Fedora did not bring her any dinner, and the whole day wore away dully and gloomily. It was the day when Samuel Hall saw her shopping in the store of Granville B. Haines & Co. Kathleen did not dream of what had happened, but Fedora had moved out of the house that day, leaving her victim to her fate.
Kathleen ate so little of the drugged food prepared for her that she had lived longer than the woman anticipated, so she decided to leave her to starve to death in the unoccupied house, where she was locked into the wretched garret.