“In heaven I trust,” Anna murmured with charitable intent.
“Not at all and never will be unless he mends his ways. He’s behind the bars. He is serving a sentence of ten years in prison for embezzlement!” cried Mrs. Phelps almost triumphantly.
CHAPTER V
“O ANNA,” cried her mother as soon as the girl had seated herself, “have you heard about the people who have moved in where the Converses moved out?”
“Why, Jenny, that’s the house where Reuben was born and brought up,” observed Seth Miller. “It was before we knew Reuben or had any suspicion there was such a person, and we get in the way of thinking he always lived at Miss Penny’s; but I mistrust he had a good home and indulgent parents until his ma died, and his pa, who was one of them musical geniuses, took to drink.”
“Yes, ma, I heard about the Lorraines. Mrs. Phelps told Miss Penny last night,” returned Anna who always spent Sunday afternoon at her own home, which was diagonally across the way from Miss Penny’s. The girl was pale to-day and leaned listlessly back in her chair in a way that was foreign to her wonted lively self. Her mother had noticed in church that Anna, who was always thin, had grown intensely so within the last fortnight and had hastened to get the dinner dishes out of the way before her daughter should rush in and take the task off her hands.
“It was all in the papers last spring,” said Miller. “They was chock full of it for a spell, and the queer part of it was that the denouncement of the hull thing came right at the same time Wat Graham was arrested over at Wenham. If it hadn’t ’a been for Wat’s brother-in-law, Mudge, going bail for him and helping settle with the creditors, why Wat himself might ’a been in the cell next to Mr. Lorraine.”
“Why, Pa Miller! Wat Graham’s in another class altogether,” protested Anna.
“I know they called Lorraine an embezzler, but I supposed that was only a polite name for thief,” her father rejoined. “Anyhow, it looked from the papers and from what was said over to Spicer’s last night as if he was a particularly mean kind of thief—sort of specialized on widders and orphans, you might say.”
Anna uttered a little cry of protest. Mrs. Phelps had said that the story was that Lorraine’s crookedness had involved thousands of small investors who had lost their all through him. She had added that more than one of those ruined thus had committed suicide. As Anna had lain awake thinking of it, she had tried to convince herself that the latter statement was false, and the rest exaggerated. She hadn’t succeeded, but it was not until now that she realized that she had utterly failed. Poor Miss Lorraine! And no wonder Mrs. Lorraine protected herself with the bristles and spikes of a porcupine!