Josephine was for a moment speechless. Never in her life had she received so great a shock. That Judge Forrest should have been dead two years and she in ignorance of it seemed impossible, and her first feeling after she began to rally a little was one of incredulity, and she asked:
“Are you not mistaken?”
“No, I’m not,” Mr. Evarts replied. “I saw Everard in Covington a few weeks after his father’s death, and talked to him of the sickness, which was apoplexy or something of that sort. Anyway, it was sudden, and Ned looked as if he hadn’t a friend in the world. I did not suppose he cared so much for his father, who, I always thought, was a cross old tyrant. I used to visit at Forrest House occasionally years ago, when we were boys, but have not been there since the judge’s death. Ned does not often come to Cincinnati, and as I have been gone most of the time for the last two years, I have heard but little of him.”
“How long, did you say, has his father been dead?” Josephine asked; and Mr. Evarts replied:
“It must be two years in November, or thereabouts.”
“And this Rosamond Hastings who lives there, how old is she, and is he going to marry her?” Josephine asked next; while Evarts thought to himself:
“Jealous, I do believe,” but he answered her:
“Miss Hastings must be seventeen or eighteen, and when I saw her, five or six years ago, was not so very handsome.”
“Yes, thank you,” Josey said, and as she just then saw Mrs. Arnold coming into the salon, she bowed to her new acquaintance, and walked away, with such a tumult in her bosom as she had never before experienced.
It would take her a little time to recover herself and decide what to do. She must have leisure for reflection; and she took it that night in her room, and sat up the entire night thinking over the events of the last two years, as connected with Everard, and coming at last to the conclusion that he was a scoundrel, whom it was her duty as well as pleasure to punish by going to America at once and claiming him as her husband.