Judith Hart gathered up the dressing-gown in her hands, and was about to replace it, when a folded paper dropped to her feet. She snatched the paper, thrust the dressing-gown back to the closet, and turned to a window, unfolding her prize as she went.
"His writing. The same great hooked letters, the same hard work in writing! 'To Walton Hurst.' It might be the same, only there is more of it, and the lines ain't quite so scraggly." Even as she talked, Judith held Jessup's letter to an opening in the shutter, and read it eagerly.
More than once Judith read the letter that Jessup had written with his last dying strength, at first with surprise deepening into terror as she went on. Then she fell into solemn thoughtfulness. Being a creature of vivid imagination, she could not stand in that death-chamber with a writing purloined from the murdered man's garments in her hand without a shiver of dread running through all her frame.
In truth, she was fearfully disturbed, and the very blood turned cold as it left her face when she thrust the paper into her bosom, shrinking from it with shudderings all the time.
After this, she remained some minutes by the window, lost in thoughts that revealed themselves plainer than language as they passed over her mobile features.
Then a sound, far down in the park, startled her and she left the house absorbed and saddened. It was well for her chances of escape that the girl left Jessup's cottage at once; for she was hardly out of sight when a group of neighbors from the funeral cortege came back, haunting those rooms with sorrowful countenances, and striving with great kindness to win the lone girl, thus suddenly made an orphan, from the terrible grief into which she had fallen.
CHAPTER LVI.
A MOTHER'S HOPEFULNESS.
AMONG the persons who had come to the gardener's funeral old Mrs. Storms was most conspicuous, not only from her high position among the tenants, but because of the relations her son was supposed to hold with the daughter, who was beloved by them all. After the funeral several neighbors offered to stay with Ruth, but in her wild wretchedness she refused them all—kindly, sweetly, as it was in her nature to do, but with a positiveness that admitted of no further urgency.