“I shall be all right in the morning,” said Fair, with a poor attempt at a smile. Poor child! She felt crushed and miserable. A bright, beautiful hope had flashed across the horizon of her dull, toilsome life, only to fade in rayless darkness, whose gloom pierced her soul. She sat down when Sadie was gone, and leaned her head on her hands, with a sigh that made Mrs. Fielding look around quickly. “You are disappointed, aren’t you, dear?” she asked. Fair struggled a moment with her feelings, then, with a brave resolve that no one should ever know of her unsought love, she answered quietly: “No, mother, only tired.” But the elder woman, who knew how much is sometimes hidden by those simple words “only tired,” comprehended more than Fair wished she should, and nodded her head in silent sorrow, for her own disappointment was very keen. But the name of Bayard Lorraine was tacitly dropped between them. He went out of their lives suddenly, as he had come into them, although not out of Fair’s thoughts, for, try to thrust his image from her heart as she would, it intruded into her thoughts, and with it came many a silent wonder over the bride that he had chosen. Was she young? Was she rich? Was she beautiful? CHAPTER V. A PERSISTENT SUITOR. Belva Platt did not find it as easy to force her recreant lover back to her feet as she had expected. Waverley Osborne was a good-looking, clever young man, with a good opinion of himself, and his love for the handsome blonde had taken flight the first time he beheld the piquant face of Fair Fielding. Although deeply disappointed and indignant at the treatment he had received at the hands of Fair and her mother, he had by no means given up the hope of winning the young girl’s regard. He was conceited, and he made up his mind that Fair only repulsed him through fear of her mother. “She would go with me fast enough only for that old cat, who wants to keep her daughter from getting married that she may support her in her laziness,” he said angrily to himself, and he made up his mind not to cease his attentions to Fair, but to conduct them more cautiously, so that he might make an impression on her girlish heart and induce her to meet him clandestinely, since her mother was opposed to his suit. So he began to write her surreptitious love letters, which he conveyed to her hands by means of the little boys about the establishment, generally as she was leaving the factory after her day’s work was done. Pretty Fair opened the first two of these epistles, and, finding them filled with praises of her beauty and protestations of love, returned both to the writer, with a curt message that she desired nothing to do with him.