A strange sense of awe and loneliness came over her when she had shut and locked the room door after Sadie. She had never spent a night alone in her life, and although it seemed that she must certainly be safe in the large building, crowded with honest working people like herself, she felt nervous and fearful.
CHAPTER XII.
A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE.
Fair read a book until ten o’clock, but the feeling of rest and security she longed for did not come. Every now and then she would start and flash her large eyes about the room and heave long sighs at its emptiness and loneliness.
Then she began to wonder how far Sadie was on her way to Philadelphia. Again she would sigh and wish her friend back, and at last her thoughts turned to the poor mother, of whom she had been so suddenly and cruelly bereaved.
“He killed her just as truly as if he had stabbed her to the heart,” she murmured bitterly. “Ah, how I hate him, how I loathe the very thought of him! Yet I am powerless to punish him for his dastardly crime.”
She did not guess that by her scorn of him, her refusal to live with him, and her precautions against him, she was punishing him in the cruelest fashion for his sins, for the poor tool that Belva had used to further her designs against Fair had fallen in love with his fate, and worshiped her with a fierce, half-savage passion that drove him wild with its futility.
To win the heart of the beautiful girl he had deceived, he would have bartered his hopes of heaven; but, in her righteous pride and scorn, she held aloof from him as the stars from the earth, and he, in a fury of jealous love, abandoned all pretense of business, and spent his days and nights in dogging her footsteps and devising means to get her into his possession.
No wonder Fair was restless and miserable, for this love of Carl Bernicci was as unrelenting as hate. It followed her with the fierce persistency of a bloodhound tracking its prey, and woe be unto her if ever she fell into his power. In some subtle way, she felt this, and her fear kept her wretched.
“If he were a gentleman, he would not persecute me. He would shrink, abashed, from the memory of what he had done, and leave me in peace, as the only atonement he could offer,” she had said to Sadie over and over; but her friend could only shake her head and answer:
“He is not exactly a gentleman, and his love for you overrules his instincts of generosity. Besides, there is Belva Platt, who no doubt spurs him on to persecute you.”