It was a week before Otho could mingle with the world again in his
search for the brave girl who had so strangely eluded him.
And then her disappearance became as strange as it had seemed the first
time.
Naturally it did not once occur to him that Floy had found a powerful
protector in the person of Miss Beresford.
The splendid house on Fifth Avenue, where the heiress lived, was the
last one he would have thought of searching for the missing girl.
Yet in that splendid casket Floy, like some beautiful precious jewel,
was hidden from his sight.
The fair girl in her modesty had refrained from acquainting her kind
employer with the story of her persecution by Otho Maury. She thought:
“If I told her all, she might think me boastful and vain.”
And she was too anxious for that lady’s good opinion to run such a risk
by lack of discretion.
She had even secured the detective’s promise of silence on the subject.
“Do not tell Miss Beresford about that villain. You can simply say you
found me at Suicide Place,” she had urged while they were on the train
coming to New York.
Thinking it could do no harm to keep the little beauty’s secret, he
consented to what she asked, and in his subsequent interview with Miss
Beresford--in which she generously remunerated him for his time and
trouble in finding her _protégée_--he made no mention of Otho Maury’s
dastardly persecution of Floy.
Floy on her part was equally reticent.
The fall from the window of her lodging-house, as told by herself,
seemed a very tame affair.
“I lost my balance while looking down and fell into the street,” she
said. “As for my sensations while plunging through the air, they were
simply indescribable in their horror; for, of course, I thought I was
rushing upon instant death. But the newsdealer’s shed broke my fall,
and I rolled down to the pavement actually unhurt, though the shock of
terror was succeeded by a long swoon, during which I was removed to
Bellevue. When I revived alone in the waiting-room and found myself
unhurt, I ran away, and what more natural than that I should hide
myself in the only refuge that belonged to me--my old home.”
She might have told her story, with all its romantic embellishments, to
Alva, and made herself a very heroine of romance in that young lady’s
eyes; but she shrunk from doing so. She dreaded ridicule, perhaps
disbelief of her strange story.
“I am safe from my enemy’s machinations now, so I will spare him until
I can pour the whole story into St. George’s ears,” she decided.
But Miss Beresford noticed that whenever she took the little beauty
for a drive in the park, as she often did, Floy was always muffled in
a very thick veil, through whose meshes even the keen eyes of love or
hate could scarcely have detected her identity.
Miss Beresford remarked on this one day, and Floy faltered out
something about sunburn and freckles.
“Oh-h, I see! You are afraid of spoiling that rose-and-lily complexion,
and I can scarcely blame you,” laughed Miss Beresford, whose rich olive
complexion could bear well the kisses of the wind and sun. Then, as she
saw how sensitively Floy blushed at her words, she added: “Or, more
likely, you are shy of the admiring glances you would meet if unveiled.”
Floy had no answer ready, for she did not wish to tell the lady that
she feared to be recognized by an enemy.