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

The matron, startled and alarmed by the appearance of the young girl, felt her heart stirred to pity, and wrote to her friends:

"Miss Lynn is no longer a raving maniac, as at first. She has become silent and melancholy, and looks so worn and ill that I fear she is slowly dying of a broken heart. I think you ought to take her home again, and see what home associations will do toward prolonging her life. She will never be troublesome or violent again; the physician assures me of that. Indeed, the state she has fallen into is one that often precedes speedy death, and the poor child ought to have home comforts and petting, now that she is so very near the end."

The matron, who had always pitied and admired the beautiful, unhappy young girl, watched over her tenderly while she waited for the answer to come to this merciful letter. She was startled at the delicacy of the young girl's form, that had been so graceful and rounded when she first came, and the pallor of her face and hands. The great Oriental dark eyes had become wild and startled, like those of a haunted fawn, and her voice when she spoke was low and tremulous, and had the sound of tears in its music.

When the matron gazed at this sweet and lovely young girl she marveled that any man's heart could have been cold and harsh enough to turn against such charms and leave that young heart to die of despair, or madden with its cruel wrongs.

"She is beautiful and refined enough for a king's bride," the matron said, with an angry thought of the monster in man's likeness who had brought the young girl to this pass.

She waited eagerly for a letter to come from Miss Watts, the girl's aunt, hoping and praying that she would take her away, and not leave her to die at the asylum.

Tears came into her kind old eyes as she thought of herself robing this beautiful form for the grave, and folding those waxen white hands on the weary breast for the last long sleep.

She did not tell Kathleen she had written to her aunt to take her away, because she feared the effect of a disappointment. She waited silently, and at last the letter came. Miss Watts was an old woman—a soured old maid, who had not much patience with love and lovers, and who had been much disgusted with her niece for losing her senses over a man's perfidy. She was blind, and her pretty niece had been eyes and hands to her before her trouble. Now she had to depend on servants entirely, and she was crosser than ever. She grumbled very much at the idea of her niece's return.

"A nice place this will be—me blind and Daisy insane," she grumbled; but the thought of the young girl's fading so fast in the asylum touched her, and she had her maid to write that the girl might come home if they were quite, quite sure she was harmless and would not make any trouble.

So Mrs. Hoover, the kind-hearted matron, came herself to bring Kathleen home to her aunt, for she wanted to explain to the old lady the young girl's strange fancy that she was not Daisy Lynn at all, but Kathleen Carew, a beautiful young Boston heiress, who had been mysteriously murdered in the vicinity of the asylum, and of whom the poor lunatic had chanced to hear in her wanderings.

So Kathleen came into her new home an utter stranger, but was received as belonging to it. The servants were new, and the old lady was blind. She could not see the face of her niece, and she attributed the strange tone of her voice to her illness. She passed her long, delicate fingers carefully over Kathleen's face, and exclaimed in surprise at its delicacy of outline.

Kathleen overwhelmed Mrs. Hoover with kisses and thanks, and called her her benefactress for securing her release from the asylum.

"I should have died or gone mad in reality if I had been kept there much longer; but now I shall go away from here and find my friends," she said, hopefully.

Mrs. 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."