"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 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.