Kathleen's Diamonds; or, She Loved a Handsome Actor

Kathleen waited with burning impatience for the answers to come to her letters. She counted the hours it would take for them to go from Philadelphia to Boston.

Meanwhile, almost unconsciously to herself, she began to take an interest in the absent girl whose place she had taken in the asylum, and in this small, neat home, so different from the splendor to which she had always been accustomed.

The little room she occupied, although not luxurious and grand like her own in her father's mansion on Commonwealth Avenue, was a perfect bower of maidenly innocence and sweet, loving fancies. The windows were curtained with white lace looped with rosy ribbons; the brass bedstead had a white lace canopy; the toilet-table, the lounge, the low chairs, all repeated the pretty fashion of white lace and rose-pink ribbons, and the floor was covered with a light-hued carpet strewn with ferns. Pretty little pictures adorned the mantel and the walls, and the daintiest kind of a dressing-case was displayed on the toilet-table. In the drawers were girlish trifles, such as young girls gather about them, and there was, too, a pretty little diary, at which Kathleen glanced with tender interest, wondering what was written on those pages, penned by the hand of a fair young girl, who had gone mad for love.

"But it would not be right to read it," she said at first, and would not touch it, until her loneliness, added to her interest in poor, missing Daisy Lynn, decided her that it would be no harm to read the diary.

She opened it, and a man's photograph fell out into her hands. She gazed at it with eager curiosity, exclaiming:

"This must be the false wretch that drove poor Daisy Lynn to madness!"

Suddenly the girl's face, already so pale and wan, whitened to an ashen hue, her great dark eyes dilated in a sort of horror, and she flung the photograph far from her into a distant corner, exclaiming, indignantly:

"Ivan Belmont, my step-mother's hateful son, whom she wanted me to marry, so that I might endow him with a fortune."

It was some time before she could command her nerves sufficiently to read Daisy Lynn's diary, and then her tears fell freely, for the story of the young girl's love was all written there, gay and joyous at first, then sad and plaintive, then drifting into deep despair, followed by the disjointed ravings of a mind distraught.

"Oh, how sweet, and then how sad!" exclaimed Kathleen. "Love comes to all young girls with the same symptoms, I suppose, for I felt just as she wrote in the first after meeting Ralph Chainey—so gay, so glad, so joyous. The sky seemed brighter, the flowers sweeter, the whole world was a new place. There is nothing in the world as sweet as love."

CHAPTER XVI.

KATHLEEN'S DESPERATION AND HER ESCAPE

"And then she sang a songThat made the tear-drops start;She sang of home, sweet home,The song that reached my heart."Popular Song.

Kathleen sighed restlessly as she turned the pages with her little white hands.

"Love is sweet, but, oh, how sad it is, too!" she sighed. "Oh, how cruel it is to love and be beloved again, yet be severed from one's love by so strange and cruel a fate as mine."

She read aloud, in a soft, murmuring voice, like sweetest music, some verses from Daisy Lynn's book:

"It is the spirit's bitterest painTo love and be beloved again,And yet between a gulf that everThe hearts that burn to meet must sever!""With me the hope of life is gone,The sun of joy is set;One wish my heart still dwells upon,The wish it could forget!I would forget that look, that tone,My heart has all too dearly known.But who could ever yet effaceFrom memory love's enduring trace?All may revolt, all my complain,But who is there may break the chain?"

"Poor Daisy Lynn! how could she love Ivan Belmont like that?" exclaimed Kathleen, in disgust, forgetting that he was a rather handsome man, and that tastes differ. A longing to see what Daisy Lynn looked like came over her, and she searched the room in vain for her picture.

Then she went down and asked Miss Watts if she might see her niece's photograph.

The old blind lady looked up with gentle displeasure.

"Daisy, child, have you no memory of the past?" she exclaimed. "You know very well that in all your life I have never allowed you to have your picture taken!"

"But why not?" asked Kathleen, in wonder.

"Because it is a sin," replied the old lady, who was rigidly religious. "Have you forgotten," she continued, "the second commandment that you used to read every Lord's day at Sabbath-school?" and she repeated, solemnly:

"'Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth; thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them.'"

Kathleen stared in amazement at this liberal interpretation of the Scriptures, and retired regretting that she could not have the sad pleasure of gazing on the features of the unfortunate girl in whose fate her own was so strangely bound up.

"Poor, poor Daisy Lynn! I wonder what became of her when she escaped her keeper and wandered abroad that cold, dark night?" she mused; and she thought that the girl must be dead and at rest from her sorrows.

A long week of waiting elapsed, but no answer came to Kathleen's letters.

Kathleen grew desperate with suspense and trouble. She could no longer while away the dreary winter days by reading poor Daisy Lynn's novels, or playing sad melodies on her pretty little piano. She began to pace up and down the little room for long hours, revolving plans for escape from Miss Watts.

The three servants whom the old lady employed guarded the young girl, by the order of their mistress, as jealously as if she had been a convict in a penitentiary. All the doors were locked and guarded by burglar chains. She had appealed to their mercy in vain; and she was empty-handed and had nothing with which to bribe them. They had been told she was melancholy mad, and saw no reason to doubt the story. Her sad, white face, her beautiful dark eyes, in which the tears so often gathered, and her mournful little songs, all lent color to the charge.

Desperate emergencies require desperate remedies. Kathleen decided, in spite of Mrs. Hoover's warnings, to run away.

She had no money; but that did not deter her from her purpose. She would beg in the street for money to go to Boston before she would remain here any longer, she told herself, with a burst of tears.

Her old fear of her step-mother had died out in the conviction that her father had, of course, returned home ere now, and that, under his protection, no harm could befall his beloved child.

From the curtained alcove where Daisy Lynn's soft, white sheets and blankets and counterpanes were stored on shelves, Kathleen brought the sheets and tore them into strips, working on them every night until she had succeeded in making a strong plaited rope with which to let herself down from the window.

"Heaven help me—dear Heaven help me!" she prayed all the while; and one dark night toward midnight she fastened the rope to the shutter hinge and let herself safely down to the street.

Stunned by the velocity of her descent, and with bleeding hands rasped by the rough rope, Kathleen fell upon the ground and lay there pantingly a few moments.

"Free at last, thank Heaven—free!" she murmured, gladly, and wrapping her long circular cloak around her, and drawing the warm hood close about her beautiful face, she ran breathlessly along, flashed around a corner, and had left her prison behind her, fleeing, as she hoped, to home and happiness.

It was growing late, and in the quiet city of Philadelphia there were few pedestrians abroad, and those mostly men. In any other city of that size Kathleen, with her beautiful face, would have been insulted over and over, but the Quaker City of Brotherly Love had in it a smaller ruffianly element than the others. When she stopped and appealed to those she met she invariably received a coin instead of a leer; but they were so small—so small, and, oh, it would take so much money to get to Boston!

She had stopped a policeman on his beat and asked him timidly how much money it would take to get to Boston.

"Oh, as much as twenty dollars, I guess!" he replied; and at his curious stare she thanked him and ran away, pausing under a street lamp to count her money.

"Only two dollars and twenty cents! I shall never, never get enough!" she sighed, and then she gave a shriek. A thief had snatched the money from her little white hand and run down a side street.

Kathleen started to run after him, but there was no policeman in sight, and the thief had quite disappeared. She ran till her limbs trembled with weariness, and suddenly emerged into Walnut Street. People were coming out of the Walnut Street Theater, and crowding the pavement. She saw a handsome man handing a fair young girl to her carriage, and the sight awoke memories of the past when she, Kathleen Carew, heiress then to a million, now a beggar in the streets, had been handed to her carriage by Ralph Chainey, the handsome young actor, who had whispered in her ear:

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