"Most bootiful lady," she said, "an' looked des like an 'ittle dirl,
see was so short, an' her eyes were so hue an' her hair so turly."
Miss McDonald had won Daisy's heart, and, knowing that made her own
happier and lighter than it had been since the day when the paper came
to her with the marked paragraph which crushed her so completely. There
had been but a few words spoken between herself and Guy, and these in
the presence of others, but at their parting he had taken her soft
little hand in his and held it a moment, while he said, with a choking
voice: "God bless you, Daisy. I shall not forget your kindness to my
poor Julia, and if you should need--but no, that is too horrible to
think of; may God spare you that. Good-by."
And that was all that passed between him and Daisy with regard to the
haunting dread which sent her in a few days to her own house in New
York, where, if the thing she feared came upon her, she would at least
be at home and know she was not endangering the lives of others. But God
was good to her, and though there was a slight fever, with darting pains
in her back and a film before her eyes, it amounted to nothing worse,
and might have been the result of fatigue and over-excitement; and when
at Christmas time, yielding to the importunities of her little
namesake, there was a picture of herself in the box sent to
Cuylerville, the face which Guy scanned even more eagerly than his
daughter, was as smooth and fair and beautiful as when he saw it at
Saratoga, bending over his dying wife.