“You have been in the mining-camp?” she asked.
“Once, only, after dark. Some day you are going to tell me the name of the man who took your slumming party there last fall and I’ll go and beat him up.”
“Never mind the man. Did you see Judith Fallon?”
“Yes; but only for a moment. I tried to get a chance to talk to her, but she wouldn’t have it.”
“She is still living with her father?”
“Yes.”
“You needn’t be afraid to tell me all of it, David.”
At that he repeated Plegg’s short account of the manner in which Judith Fallon had come to Powder Can, and its near-tragic outcome.
“How terrible!” she said. “I remember Tom Judson, just vaguely, as a handsome little kiddie with light curly hair and the bluest of blue eyes. And he’s grown up into that!”
“Yes; and he didn’t take long about it, either,” said David. “Long before he was expelled from college he was Middleboro’s most shining example of depravity.”