She stayed a little longer, then rose, saying anxiously:
“Fair, don’t you think you can get that good woman to stay with you to-night?”
“I will try, dear, but then I shall have no one to go to work with me to-morrow, and, oh, I am such a coward I dare not go out alone,” Fair answered dejectedly.
Alice regarded her in perplexed silence a moment, then blurted out:
“Fair, I’m afraid you’ll have to give in and live with him for the sake of peace.”
The beautiful brown eyes flashed angrily, and Fair cried out:
“That is what they all say, but I will never do it—never! Why, Alice, if I could forgive him the deception he practiced on me, I could never pardon the death of my mother, which he caused. Before I would live with such a fiend as Carl Bernicci I would kill myself!”
Alice went away sad at heart, but not half so sad as the hapless girl she left behind her, for a new suspicion had entered Fair’s mind.
She began to fear that Sadie’s telegram was a bogus one, sent to draw her faithful friend away from her side.
“For how else could that wretch ever have known so quickly of her absence?” she thought.