He did not know how Pansy was touched by his kindness and friendship. She was very lonely, for the few acquaintances she had made during Mrs. Beach’s life did not trouble themselves about her now that she was poor and friendless. They were rich, fashionable people, too, who had no time, if they had had the inclination, to look after any one not in society. They were very gracious to Colonel Falconer, but that little typewriter girl to whom he was so attentive--that was altogether different. Some there were who hinted to him that it was a mistake on his part to show her so much kindness. It would spoil her for her humbler lot, awaken in her aspirations for higher things than she could reasonably expect. They set Colonel Falconer thinking, and the upshot of it was that he went away to San Francisco for several months. He did not go to bid Pansy good-by, but simply sent her a note of farewell, saying that he would write her sometimes and requesting the favor of a reply. “Oh, how I miss him! It was like having a kind elder brother,” Pansy sighed to herself, and now the evenings and Sundays grew very lonely, indeed. There were no more pleasant drives Sunday afternoons, spinning over the sands past the glittering bay; no more books, nor fruits and flowers. There was a young clerk in the office where she worked who would have made love to her if she would have noticed him, but she never did, and in her loneliness her thoughts went back more and more to her lost love and her dead past. CHAPTER XIII. IN A BOARDING HOUSE. Perhaps it was the brooding over the past and the pain and remorse that wore upon Pansy until she fell ill and had that long fever, although some of the little household declared that it was something she had read in a Southern paper. When Colonel Falconer, who had grown uneasy because his last letter to Pansy was not answered, came suddenly back to San Diego, he found that the girl had been ill of a brain fever for several weeks. The mistress of the boarding house, who had been very kind to the sick girl, explained everything as well as she could: “She had been looking droopy an’ peaked some time, an’ her appetite no better than a baby’s, when she kem inter the parlor one Sunday after church, an’ set down to read. All at once she screamed out, an’ fell in a faint. She had this paper in her hand, an’ I’ll allus believe she read something in it that was bad news to her. But I’ve read it through an’ through, and I can’t guess what ’tis. Maybe you kin.” She put the newspaper in his hand--one almost two months old. It was a daily paper, published at Richmond, Virginia. “I do not think anything in this could have affected her. She was from Kentucky. Where did she get this?” he asked. “Some transient boarder must have left it, I think. It had been laying around on the parlor table several days when she picked it up.”