CHAPTER XXXII.
THE MISSING GIRL.
By the help of her maid, Fair had found a temporary refuge in London with Betty’s parents. The sale of her diamonds at a price much below their real value had enabled her to pay her board and remain in close hiding until the search for her in England had blown over.
Betty, having lost her situation at the villa by the flight of Fair, soon came home, too, and not a day too early, for she had to nurse Fair through a long spell of fever, in which she very nearly lost the life that had now become so valueless and dreary that she regretted that she did not die.
When she began to convalesce, she found that five months had elapsed since she fled from the villa. Her stock of money began to run low, and she knew that she would have to go to work to earn her daily bread.
Her thoughts turned to Sadie Allen and the factory where she had worked for years, and a sudden resolve came to her.
“I will go back. Carl Bernicci would not think of going to New York to look for me.”
The idea of any one else looking for her never occurred to her mind.
Mrs. Howard had flung her out of her heart and care as a disgraced, unworthy creature, and Bayard Lorraine was perhaps dead by now—dead by the hand of the man who claimed her as his wife, she thought, with a violent shudder.
Yes, no one would search for her but the man whose love had been her fate. He would pursue her with a love more unrelenting than hate, and all her life she would have to evade him.
“I shall never dare to venture abroad without a disguise again,” she thought anxiously, and when she sailed, a few weeks later, for America, she went as a steerage passenger, an ignorant Irish girl, going to New York to marry her lover, an Irish hod-carrier, who had left the old country two years before, and was rich enough now to send money to his sweetheart to follow him.