“Who’ll be our mamma now?  We must have one.  Will oo?” little Daisy asked, as she hung about the neck of her new friend.

She knew it was Miss McDolly, her “sake-name,” and in her delight at seeing her and her admiration of her great beauty, she forgot in part the dead mamma on whose grave the summer sun was shining.

The Thorntons left the hotel that day and went back to the house in Cuylerville, which had been closed for a few weeks, Miss Frances being away with some friends in Connecticut.  But she returned at once when she heard the dreadful news, and was there to receive her brother and his motherless little ones.  He told her of Daisy when he could trust himself to talk at all, of Julia’s sickness and death, and Miss Frances felt her heart go out as it had never gone before toward the woman about whom little Daisy talked constantly.

“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.

CHAPTER XIII

DAISY’S JOURNAL

New York, June 14, 18—.

To-morrow I am to take my old name of Thornton again, and be Guy’s wife once more.  Nor does it seem strange at all that I should do so, for I have never thought of myself as not belonging to him, even when I knew he was another’s.  And yet when in that dreadful night at Saratoga I went to Julia’s room, there was in my heart no thought of this which has come to me.  I only wished to care for her and to be a help to Guy.  I did not think of her dying, and after she was dead there was not a thought of the future in my mind until little Daisy put it there by asking if I would be her mamma.  Then I seemed to see it all, and expected it up to the very day, six weeks ago, when Guy wrote to me:  “Daisy, I want you.  Will you come to me again as my wife?”