“I never loved you half as well as I do now.”

It was a pretty child, with dark blue eyes, and hair in which there was a gleam of gold, and Guy, when asked what he would call her, said: 

“Would you object to Margaret?”

Julia knew what he meant, and, like the true, noble woman she was, offered no objection to Guy’s choice, knowing well who Margaret had been; and herself first gave the pet name of Daisy to her child, on whom Guy settled the ten thousand dollars sent to him by the Daisy over the sea.

CHAPTER IX

DAISY, TOM, AND THAT OTHER ONE

Watching, waiting, hoping, saying to herself in the morning, “It will come before night,” and saying to herself at night, “It will be here to-morrow morning.”  Such was Daisy’s life, even before she had a right to expect an answer to her letter.

Of the nature of Guy’s reply she had no doubt.  He had loved her once, he loved her still, and he would take her back of course.  There was no truth in that rumor of another marriage.  Possibly her father, whom she understood now better than she once had, had gotten the story up for the sake of inducing her through pique to marry Tom; but if so his plan would fail.  Guy would write to her, “Come!” and she would go, and more than once she counted the contents of her purse and added to it the sum due her from Madame Lafarcade, and wondered if she would dare venture on the journey with so small a sum.

“You so happy and white, too, ce matin,” her little pupil, Pauline, said to her one day, when they sat together in the garden, and Daisy was indulging in a fanciful picture of her meeting with Guy.

“Yes, I am happy,” Daisy said, rousing from her reverie; “but I did not know I was pale—­or white, as you term it—­though, now I think of it, I do feel sick and faint.  It’s the heat, I guess.  Oh! there is Max with the mail!  He is coming this way!  He has—­he certainly has something for me!”

Daisy’s cheeks were scarlet now, and her eyes were bright as stars as she went forward to meet the man who brought the letters to the house.

“Only a paper!—­is there nothing more?” she asked in an unsteady voice, as she took the paper in her hand, and, recognizing Guy’s handwriting, knew almost to a certainty what was before her.

“Oh, mon Dieu! vous etes malade!  J’apporterai un verre d’eau!” Pauline exclaimed, forgetting her English and adopting her mother tongue in her alarm at Daisy’s white face and the peculiar tone of her voice.

“No, Pauline, stay; open the paper for me,” Daisy said, feeling that it would be easier so than to read it herself, for she knew it was there, else he would never have sent her a paper and nothing more.

Delighted to be of some use, and a little gratified to open a foreign paper, Pauline tore off the wrapper, starting a little at Daisy’s quick, sharp cry as she made a rent across the handwriting.