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Hoover looked very much alarmed at this declaration.

      "My dear, if I had thought you would run away, I would not have brought you here," she exclaimed, uneasily.

      "But, dear madame, I have no claim on this old lady here, and I must think of my poor father, who has returned from Europe ere this, I know, and is mourning me as dead," obstinately answered the pale young girl, whose heart throbbed wildly at the thought of returning to her home and friends.

      The good old matron seized the wasted little white hand of the girl, and patted it tenderly in hers, as she said, remonstratingly:

      "Now, listen to me, Daisy, dear: If you run away from home your aunt will have you followed and brought back to the asylum, and you know you would not like that, would you?"

      "I would rather die," sobbed the poor girl, trembling like an aspen leaf.

      "Then take my advice, and don't do anything rash, dear child. Now here's a good idea: Stay quietly here, and write to your friends to come to you here," said the matron, who thought that this would pacify Kathleen a while.

      "But I wrote to them from the asylum. I wrote and wrote and wrote—all in vain," sighed the girl.

      "Perhaps your folks were out of town. I would try again," soothed the matron, who knew that none of those pathetic letters had ever gone outside the asylum.

      "I will write again," said Kathleen, patiently, for the matron's hints had sorely frightened her. She did not want to run away and be captured and taken back to her terrible prison. She resolved to write again; then, if no answer came, she must dare her fate. Let her but get safely home and all would be explained, and her pursuers would have to go away baffled.

      "How angry papa will be when he finds out what horrors his little girl has endured," she thought, with burning tears.

      So Mrs. Hoover went away, sadly believing that she should never see the poor, sweet child again; she looked so wan and pallid, as if she already had "one foot in the grave."

      Then Kathleen, who was left to herself almost all the time, went back to poor Daisy Lynn's room, and began to write to all her friends. By night she had quite a pile of letters to post.

      She had written to her father, to Helen Fox, to Alpine Belmont, to several of her girl friends, to Ralph Chainey, and even to Teddy Darrell, who had loved her and asked her to marry him. Despite his flirting propensities, Teddy was a prime favorite with every one because of his warm heart and good nature. If any one asked Teddy Darrell to do a favor, he would "go through fire and water" to accomplish it. Helen Fox was accustomed to say, laughingly, that Teddy Darrell would try to flirt with a broom-stick if he only saw a woman's dress on it; but beyond this weakness, which the girls easily forgave, he was a thoroughly good fellow, with a good figure, handsome face, and a pair of dark eyes that always laughed their owner into your good graces.

      "Some of them will get my letters, surely, and come for me," she thought, as she started out to post her letters.

      Her aunt sent a servant to post them and ordered her back.

      "Reba will always do your errands for you," she said; and Kathleen had to relinquish them reluctantly to the maid.

      Reba had her instructions, and while Kathleen watched her from the window, she cleverly pushed some scraps of papers into the letter-box on the corner, and carried the letters back to Miss Watts, who locked them into her private desk.

      "It is strange what a fad she has taken into her head!" she thought, carelessly.

      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 song

      That 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 pain

      To love and be beloved again,

      And yet between a gulf that ever

      The 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 efface

      From 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

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