“I will go back. Carl Bernicci would not think of going to New York to look for me.” The idea of any one else looking for her never occurred to her mind. Mrs. Howard had flung her out of her heart and care as a disgraced, unworthy creature, and Bayard Lorraine was perhaps dead by now--dead by the hand of the man who claimed her as his wife, she thought, with a violent shudder. Yes, no one would search for her but the man whose love had been her fate. He would pursue her with a love more unrelenting than hate, and all her life she would have to evade him. “I shall never dare to venture abroad without a disguise again,” she thought anxiously, and when she sailed, a few weeks later, for America, she went as a steerage passenger, an ignorant Irish girl, going to New York to marry her lover, an Irish hod-carrier, who had left the old country two years before, and was rich enough now to send money to his sweetheart to follow him. But when she applied at the factory for work, the Irish girl had disappeared, and she was Widow Karrick, an Englishwoman, who dropped her h’s persistently and wore blue glasses over her brown eyes, and a little cap, in the English fashion, over a mop of thick black hair, in which there were many streaks of gray. She was dressed in rusty black, ill-made and ill-fitting, and was altogether so shabby and ordinary-looking that very few noticed what pretty features she had, as a dark, muddy complexion obscured their beauty. She was given a machine, and Mrs. Jones found that she was a good worker. Beyond that she never took much notice of Mrs. Karrick, for, as she said to her husband, when discussing the new hand, “foreigners were never to her taste.” Months came and went, and Fair, in her character of Widow Karrick, worked on patiently and without molestation or recognition, among the very companions she had dwelt among for years. “They have forgotten my very name and existence,” she thought bitterly, for in all those months no one ever recalled the past, or mentioned her name. It had been so long ago that new interests absorbed the working girls. But their forgetfulness did not wound her half so much as the fact that she had been disappointed in finding her old friend, Sadie Allen. She had expected that Sadie would be working still at the machine next her own, but she was mistaken. The kind, homely face of her friend never made its appearance in the workrooms again, and she dared not make any inquiries. “Perhaps she never came back from Philadelphia,” she thought. “Perhaps her sister died, and she had to remain there and take care of her little orphan children.” This belief seemed so plausible that she began at last to accept it as the correct view. It never occurred to her that Sadie could be married. To her knowledge, the girl had never had a beau. Young men did not care for her because her face was so plain.