“Oh, how brave and good you are, Mr. Osborne! I can never cease to thank you for this timely rescue,” cried Sadie gratefully, and somehow the romance of the occasion led each to take an interest in each other. Sadie wondered in secret how Fair Fielding could have been so indifferent to so brave and good-looking a young man, and Waverley thought it was strange that he had never noticed before how pleasant a girl Sadie Allen was--not pretty, but he was rather disgusted with beauty, anyway. He had found out that Belva Platt blondined her hair and painted her cheeks and lips. When he had turned in disgust from these false charms to Fair Fielding, the latter’s scornful airs and ambitious views had thrown cold water on his budding hopes. Truly he had reason to conceive an antipathy to beauty. So Sadie caught his heart in the rebound, and as she won it by force of honest merit, not meretricious charms, she was able to hold and keep it. In a very few months the courtship that had begun on the day when he opened her prison door ended in a happy and suitable marriage. Belva Platt was furious with jealous rage, but she had become so unpopular at the factory since her wicked revenge upon Fair Fielding that she dared not vent her anger in anything but spiteful speeches, and in ignoring the bride and groom. She had lost him forever, and not one of the working girls but exulted in her defeat. The married pair went to housekeeping on a simple scale, and each kept on with their factory work. Sadie learned that the old woman who had kept her imprisoned was the grandmother of Belva Platt. They made no effort to have any of the parties punished for Sadie’s imprisonment, for it was rumored that Carl Bernicci had drowned himself in despair at his wife’s strange disappearance. CHAPTER XXX. THE RETURNED HUSBAND. Sadie worked on at the factory for a year after her marriage; then she had to give up her machine and stay at home. Heaven had sent her a bouncing boy baby, and it required the most of her time to tend the house and the child. Waverley Osborne was in receipt of a fair salary, too, and declared that there was no longer any good reason for his wife to go out to work. The precious boy was more than a year old when Waverley Osborne came home one evening and told her that the factory had had quite a sensation that day. “Carl Bernicci turned up alive after everybody had been thinking he was dead for two years,” he said. “He was looking for his wife, and he told the girls the strangest story you ever heard, Sadie.” “Some lie, no doubt, like all the rest of his tales,” exclaimed Sadie Osborne indignantly, for her anger against the Italian began to revive afresh at hearing that he was alive. “No; I think this was actual truth,” said Waverley Osborne, and he told his wife that the Italian was now rich and great, and had the title of a prince in his own country.