But through her vaulting ambition came her terrible downfall. A young man, Carl Bernicci by name, saw the factory girl, and fell in love with her. He begged one of her associates in the factory to introduce him, but was assured that the pretty Miss Fielding would not look at a poor man. Then, just for a joke, he proposed that he should represent himself as a very wealthy man. Miss Fielding was caught by the glittering bait, and accepted him when he proposed marriage. In a few weeks they were solemnly united in wedlock, the young lover thinking that she would forgive his deception when she found it out, for the sake of their mutual love. How much he deceived himself may be understood by the fact that his girl bride left him forever within an hour after their marriage, vowing vengeance on him for the trick by which he had won her hand. For several weeks he haunted her humble home, where she lived with her mother, but both refused to have anything to do with him, for the mother was as ambitious and unforgiving as the daughter. But very suddenly the parent died of heart disease, and soon afterward the girl disappeared and her whereabouts became a mystery to every one. Carl Bernicci, the despised yet devoted husband, was in despair, fearing that she had gone to the bad to avenge herself upon him. His fears, unhappily, had good ground, for it was soon discovered that she had fallen into evil ways. She was seen lately riding in an open carriage with a notorious woman, and Carl Bernicci, driven to desperation, flung himself yesterday into the East River and was drowned. The body was not recovered. This was what Fair had read. This was what had driven the color from her face and lips, this horror of Carl Bernicci’s tragic death. But little by little the blushes came back, and the thought that now she was free to love Bayard Lorraine made her glad that the man she feared and hated was dead. “But what a tissue of lies the whole thing was!” she thought indignantly. “How dared any one assert that I had gone to the bad? I was never out in a carriage but once, and then I went with Mrs. Howard’s maid to a department store to leave an order for my traveling outfit. I was most falsely accused, and I believe that Belva Platt was the enemy that started the slander,” she said to herself bitterly. Then she looked at her lover, and saw that his handsome blond face had on it a thoughtful frown. She thought to herself that she would like to kiss the line away, but she did not dare--she was too much afraid of her grand lover. So she only asked timidly: “Will it make a good novel?” She had asked the question to draw him out. She had a curiosity to hear him discuss her story, distorted though it was in the newspaper’s telling. Would he, she wondered, say a kind word of the girl who had been so bitterly deceived and wronged?