Fair did not believe the story of the rich beau. She remembered that Belva Platt had had some sort of power over Carl Bernicci that enabled her to make him a tool when she chose, and she guessed now that the wicked girl was levying blackmail upon Prince Gonzaga. Her suspicion was true. Belva was indeed extorting hush money from the prince, in whose past life there was a secret to which she held the key. Indeed, her ambition had taken such a turn that she hinted to him that it would be politic for him to obtain a divorce from his runaway wife and marry her, in order to be sure that his secret should remain untold. “How I should like to be the Princess Gonzaga, rich and grand, and look down upon Waverley Osborne and his ugly wife!” she thought longingly, little dreaming that the real Princess Gonzaga was but a few feet away from her, earning her daily bread by her labor at the sewing machine, and preferring that life to one of gilded splendor as a prince’s bride. The day came at last when all of Fair’s peace was to be broken up and her heart racked anew by the mingled joy and misery of that love which she had said so often had been her fate. She had believed for many months that Bayard Lorraine was dead, when one day he suddenly made his appearance in the workroom, startling her so that she nearly betrayed herself by a wild shriek, but she remembered herself just in time to pretend to her next neighbor that she had pierced her thumb with a machine needle. Watching her lost love with adoring eyes, whose expression was hidden behind the disfiguring blue glasses, she heard all his questions and Mrs. Jones’ replies, and so found out that Sadie Allen was the wife of Waverley Osborne. She also heard Sadie’s address, and resolved that she would call upon her old friend and find out what Bayard Lorraine wanted. “My darling--how kindly he speaks of me!” she thought, with a thrill of rapture. “Ah, he does not believe me wholly wicked. I always felt that he would pity me and take my part if he knew all.” When she left the factory that afternoon, she found that she was followed by a strange man, and trembled as she remembered the gossip about Prince Gonzaga’s private detective. CHAPTER XXXIII. GREETING AN OLD FRIEND. Fair reached her humble lodgings unmolested, although she could not shake off from her mind the haunting dread of the strange man who had, as she was sure, followed her home, and whom she foreboded must be the detective employed by Prince Gonzaga, although heretofore she had doubted his existence. “He is on my track. He has perhaps penetrated my disguise. Oh, what shall I do now?” she thought, in wild alarm, as she closed and locked the door and sat down to think. Knowing her husband as well as she did, she knew he would pursue her unrelentingly if he became aware of her whereabouts. At any moment he might break in upon her solitude and claim her for his wife, defying the whole world to wrest her from him.