Eva would never forget the sunny May day when her lover returned to Weston. Everything was so green and lovely on the wide grounds, the sky was so bright and blue, the flowers so sweet, and the pretty feathered songsters in the trees were fairly splitting their very throats with joyful songs of love that found a happy echo in her heart.
When Doctor Bertrand came into Eva’s ward that afternoon, she just happened to mention that Doctor Rupert had returned, and straightway the whole world was transformed, glorified, to Eva. Her eager heart leaped with joyful emotion and she turned her face quickly aside that no one might see the lovely crimson that overspread it at mention of his name.
Doctor Bertrand just smiled to herself and passed on without a word to betray that her kind eyes had read the secret of two fond hearts. She thought it was a pretty love story that was going to end happily in a wedding, as all sweet love stories mostly ended.
And she did not dream of the terrible barrier between those two yearning hearts—the barrier of a kinsman’s blood!
For the carping world said that Doctor Ludington had murdered Terry Groves—that his hands were red with his foeman’s blood. No one excused him because it had really been an accident. They chose to put the worst construction on the tragedy.
So that if the young doctor had returned to them from the dead, the side of the clan that sympathized with the Groves family would have been ready to howl execrations upon his head.
Of the keen, bitter pain in his heart at his fate, at the isolation from home and parents, who could tell? He bore it in silence for the sake of the one sweet drop in the bitter cup.
In renouncing home and kindred love, in giving up his birthright and his name, there was one compensation that would pay for all—he would be free to woo and win little Eva.
Once he had put the past behind him there was no looking backward, no futile regret for what was lost. Of all that the wide world could have offered him he would have chosen bonnie, dark-eyed Eva as the best of all.
And fate was going to grant him his heart’s desire.