“If I told her all, she might think me boastful and vain.”
And she was too anxious for that lady’s good opinion to run such a risk by lack of discretion.
She had even secured the detective’s promise of silence on the subject.
“Do not tell Miss Beresford about that villain. You can simply say you found me at Suicide Place,” she had urged while they were on the train coming to New York.
Thinking it could do no harm to keep the little beauty’s secret, he consented to what she asked, and in his subsequent interview with Miss Beresford—in which she generously remunerated him for his time and trouble in finding her protégée—he made no mention of Otho Maury’s dastardly persecution of Floy.
Floy on her part was equally reticent.
The fall from the window of her lodging-house, as told by herself, seemed a very tame affair.
“I lost my balance while looking down and fell into the street,” she said. “As for my sensations while plunging through the air, they were simply indescribable in their horror; for, of course, I thought I was rushing upon instant death. But the newsdealer’s shed broke my fall, and I rolled down to the pavement actually unhurt, though the shock of terror was succeeded by a long swoon, during which I was removed to Bellevue. When I revived alone in the waiting-room and found myself unhurt, I ran away, and what more natural than that I should hide myself in the only refuge that belonged to me—my old home.”
She might have told her story, with all its romantic embellishments, to Alva, and made herself a very heroine of romance in that young lady’s eyes; but she shrunk from doing so. She dreaded ridicule, perhaps disbelief of her strange story.
“I am safe from my enemy’s machinations now, so I will spare him until I can pour the whole story into St. George’s ears,” she decided.