When she left the factory that afternoon, she found that she was followed by a strange man, and trembled as she remembered the gossip about Prince Gonzaga’s private detective.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
GREETING AN OLD FRIEND.
Fair reached her humble lodgings unmolested, although she could not shake off from her mind the haunting dread of the strange man who had, as she was sure, followed her home, and whom she foreboded must be the detective employed by Prince Gonzaga, although heretofore she had doubted his existence.
“He is on my track. He has perhaps penetrated my disguise. Oh, what shall I do now?” she thought, in wild alarm, as she closed and locked the door and sat down to think.
Knowing her husband as well as she did, she knew he would pursue her unrelentingly if he became aware of her whereabouts. At any moment he might break in upon her solitude and claim her for his wife, defying the whole world to wrest her from him.
She grew sick with fear and terror, and began to think wildly of escape.
“If I could only get to my old friend Sadie, she would help me to elude him,” she murmured, as she paced wildly up and down the room. “But no doubt this house is watched, and were I to go out I might be caught in his trap at once. Oh!”
A clever thought had come to her all at once.
She might disguise herself as a boy, and so venture into the street and seek the home of Sadie.
In her trunk was a boy’s suit, which she had bought in England when the thought of assuming a disguise first occurred to her; afterward she had decided not to use it, fearing she might be detected and arrested.