The reporter on the Sentinel had served up what he called the second installment of the Groves-Ludington tragedy in a very sensational column.
Mr. Somerville, attracted by the name of Groves, read it through attentively, starting when he came to the name of Eva Somerville.
Enough facts had been given to make him sure that she was the same girl he had encountered on the train, the granddaughter of old Grandfather Groves.
But why call her Somerville?
It gave him such a violent start that he read it over again with feverish haste, though he found in it no answer to his tremulous question.
A terrible suspicion crossed his mind, and his handsome face paled to an ashen hue, while he cried out aloud in mingled pain and wonder:
“What mystery is here?”
He was quite alone, or people would have thought him demented, he looked so wild and talked so strangely. He lost all his elegant self-possession, he strode hurriedly up and down the room with the paper crushed in his shaking hand.
His thoughts were in a whirl. He thought of the beautiful little Eva he had met on the train; the piteous, frightened creature, so ignorant of life outside her rustic neighborhood that she thought she could ride on the train, and pay her fare afterward. He had not had the heart to laugh at her mistake like the other passengers, because she had pierced his heart with her subtle likeness to one long dead—the fair young wife who had wearied of him and the luxurious home he gave her, and fled from him back to her old home and her rustic surroundings to die.
Had she carried with her an unsuspected secret, poor, willful Nell? Had her people dared keep from him the truth that, in dying, she had left him a daughter? Had they let him go childless all these years, keeping him from his own, and turning her out upon the world in disgrace and despair?