“Then serve it at once,” Ada said; “but why do you think he will not return?”
“He left the house last night, miss, after you had gone to bed, and he has not been seen since.”
Ada’s heart stood still. “Not been seen since! What do you mean? Has he not been at his office? Perhaps he is with my mother?”
“I don’t think so, miss. Have you not seen the evening papers?” The man held a copy behind his back, Ada heard it rustle.
“Give it me,” she cried, as she put one hand on the handsomely carved pedestal which held a statue of the dancing fawn to steady herself.
“I’m sorry, miss, to be the one to hand it to you, but the whole city knows it by this time. It can’t be hid from you much longer.”
The girl looked at him with a kindly pity in her eyes. She was sorrier for him at that moment than for herself. He was a faithful old servant who had been with them since she was a baby. He handed her the paper and went softly from the room, having the delicacy to feel that it was not the place even of an old servant to see his young mistress’s sorrow.
“He’s a low skunking hound,” he said to himself, “if he is my master, to leave the pretty bit of a creature like that with those two children on her hands. Whatever will happen to them, I don’t know. There’s about enough money in the house to pay off all these miserable servants, and not much more. It’s the dirtiest trick I ever saw played. It was the disgrace and shock that sent his poor wife off her head, him living like a prince while he’s been defrauding poor widows and children.”
About a month from that day pretty Ada Nicoli, who had been brought up to look upon herself as an heiress, started out through the city of New York to try and find some means of livelihood for herself and her two little sisters. Her mother’s little fortune brought in just enough money to pay for her residence in the comfortable asylum to which she had gone before the terrible exposure of Mr. Nicoli’s failure had been made public, and to pay the weekly board for Ada and her two sisters at a plain middle-class boarding-house in East Thirty-second Street.