“Wayne’s Faithful Sweetheart” — A Lost Novel of Nellie Bly — Chapter One

A MOTHER’S SECRET — AND A YOUNG GIRL’S GRIEF.

She was very young, exquisitely beautiful, and delicately refined — the last girl in the world one would expect to find starving in a little bare room on the top floor of a noisy tenement. Nevertheless, she had lived there for years, silent and unobtrusive, knowing nothing of her neighbors, and being regarded by them as “a poor, stuck-up thing, who thinks she’s better than other people, because she has a pretty face.”

When her mother moved there she was very young. They had been able to rent the first floor then, and she remembered she had a little sister to play with, and that her mother never permitted them to associate with the other children about the house.

When she grew older she often thought of the day her mother locked her alone in the room and went away with a strange man.

She remembered how frightened she was, and how she trembled at the least sound, fearing every moment the door would open and a big “bogeyman” would spring in and carry her away off where she would never see her dear mamma anymore. She had cried softly to herself, and her big, startled eyes watched the dark shadows creep into the room, until her baby heart stood still with terror. When she could no longer see, she buried…