or of
murmuring against her fate, but accepted it meekly, albeit she staggered
under the load and grew faint as she thought of the lonely life before
her, and she so young.

Slowly she went back to her room, while Pauline walked up and down the
garden trying to make out the relationship between the newly married
Thornton and her teacher.

"The son of her husband's father?" she repeated, until at last a meaning
dawned upon her, and she said: "Then he must be her brother-in-law; but
why didn't she say so? Maybe, though, that is the English way of putting
it," and, having thus settled the matter, Pauline joined her mother, who
was asking for Mrs. Thornton.

"Gone to her room, and her brother-in-law is married. It was marked in a
paper and I read it to her, and she's sick," Pauline said, without,
however, in the least connecting the sickness with the marriage.

Daisy did not come down to dinner that night, and the maid who called
her the next morning reported her as ill and acting very strangely.
Through the summer a malarial fever had prevailed to some extent in and
about Rouen, and the physician whom Madame Lafarcade summoned to the
sick girl expressed a fear that she was coming down with it, and ordered
her kept as quiet as possible.

"She seems to have something weighing on her mind. Has she heard any bad
news from home?" he asked, as in reply to his question where her pain
was the worst Daisy always answered:

"It reached him too late--too late, and I am so sorry."

Madame knew of no bad news, she said, and then as she saw the foreign
paper lying on the table, she took it up, and, guided by the pencil
marks, read the notice of Guy Thornton's marriage, and that gave her the
key at once to Daisy's mental agitation. Daisy had been frank with her
and told her as much of her story as was necessary, and she knew that
the Guy Thornton married to Julia Hamilton had once called Daisy his
wife.

"Excuse me, she is, or she has something on her mind, I suspect," she
said to the physician, who was still holding Daisy's hand and looking
anxiously at her flushed cheeks and bright, restless eyes.

"I thought so," he rejoined, "and it aggravates all the symptoms of her
fever. I shall call again to-night."

He did call and found his patient worse, and the next day he asked
Madame Lafarcade:

"Has she friends in this country? If so, they ought to know."

A few hours later, and in his lodgings at Berlin, Tom read the follo