“O Cousin Isa! what must I do?  I’m breaking poor Smith’s heart.  You don’t know how much he loves me, and I’m afraid something dreadful will happen to him, you know.  What shall I do?”

“I don’t think he cares much, Katy.  He’s a bad man, I’m afraid, and doesn’t love you really.  Don’t think any more of him.”  For Isabel couldn’t find it in her heart to say to Katy just what she thought of Westcott.

“Oh! but you don’t know him,” Katy cries.  “You don’t know him.  He says that he does naughty things sometimes, but then he’s got such a tender heart.  He made me promise I wouldn’t throw him over, as he called it, for his faults.  He said he’d come to be good if I’d only keep on loving him.  And I said I would.  And I haven’t.  Here’s more than a week now that he hasn’t been here, and I haven’t been to the store.  And he said he’d go to sleep in the lake some night if I ever, ever proved false to him.  And I lie awake nearly all night thinking how hard and cruel I’ve been to him.  And oh!”—­here Katy cried awhile—­“and oh!  I think such awful things sometimes,” she continued in a whisper broken by sobs.  “You don’t know, Cousin Isa.  I think how cold, how dreadful cold the lake must be!  Oo-oo!” And a shudder shook her frame.  “If poor, dear Smith were to throw himself in!  What if he is there now?” And she looked up at Isa with staring eyes.  “Do you know what an awful thing I heard about that lake once?” She stopped and shivered.  “There are leeches in it—­nasty, black worms—­and one of them bit my hand once.  And they told me that if a person should be drowned in Diamond Lake the leeches would—­oo!—­take all their blood, and their faces would be white, and not black like other drowned people’s faces.  Oh!  I can’t bear to think about poor Smith.  If I could only write him a note, and tell him I love him just a little!  But I told Albert I wouldn’t see him nor write to him.  What shall I do?  He mayn’t live till morning.  They say he looks broken-hearted.  He’ll throw himself into that cold lake to-night, maybe—­and the leeches—­the black worms—­oo!—­or else he’ll kill himself with that ugly pistol.”

It was in vain that Isabel talked to her, in vain that she tried to argue with a cataract of feeling.  It was rowing against Niagara with a canoe-paddle.  It was not wonderful, therefore, that before Albert got back, Isa Marlay found Katy reading little notes from Westcott, notes that ho had intrusted to one of his clerks, who was sent to the post-office three or four times a day on various pretexts, until he should happen to find Katy in the office.  Then he would hand her the notes.  Katy did not reply.  She had promised Albert she wouldn’t.  But there was no harm in her reading them, just to keep Smith from drowning himself among those black leeches in Diamond Lake.

Isabel Marlay, in her distressful sense of responsibility to Albert, could yet find no means of breaking up this renewed communication.  In sheer desperation, she appealed to Mrs. Plausaby.