She looked eagerly for the letters from Ada Winton; she read them over and over; she wept with joy at the news that he was found guilty only of manslaughter and his punishment fixed at only three months in prison.
The two young men who had been eyewitnesses of the tragedy had boldly come forward and testified that Terry Groves’ death was an accident caused by the struggle for the weapon with which he had first shot Doctor Ludington.
So the jury had brought in their verdict as manslaughter, and in accordance with the result he had been sentenced. The verdict created different sensations, of course, among the opposing clans of Groves and Ludingtons.
That was history now, and the young doctor had long ago been released from prison and gone away from the scenes of tragedy that had embittered his life. The Ludingtons had grown rich by the discovery of oil on their lands, and the old people dwelt in luxury at Fernside, but their son had become a wanderer, seeking surcease of sorrow in distant scenes and pleasures, Ada wrote, with generous sympathy and pity for the discarded lover.
The Groves twins had gone with Miss Ruttencutter to live at Clarksburg, and within the past year Lydia had married a rich merchant of Charleston and now made her home there. Cousin Tabby had visited her there and realized her ambition “to see the governor and the other big men,” but Patty was still sighing for New York and the great catch she hoped to make there. She had been heard to remark that she was sorry she was “at outs” with her Cousin Eva, for she might otherwise have visited her there for a season.
But though Eva heard of the remark she did not take the hint; she could never forgive Patty Groves for locking her up in her room while her grandfather died. The malice and cruelty of that deed stood alone like the act of a fiend.
Coming back to New York with her father to his palatial Fifth Avenue home, Eva had been introduced to fashionable society by the widowed sister of Mr. Somerville, who presided over his stately home. His proud mother and elder sister, whose cruel scheming had deceived his young wife, and driven her from home in despair, were both dead, and the younger sister being in boarding school at the time, and now a childless widow, knew just enough of the tragedy to welcome Eva as one who had been wronged, and to whom she owed infinite love and care, in atonement for the errors of the dead. This lady, Mrs. Hamilton, had a handsome stepson, Reginald, who lived in apartments and led the gay life of a young millionaire, but came often to the mansion, ostensibly to visit his stepmother, but in reality to sun himself in the light of Eva’s bewildering dark eyes.
The young aristocrat had decided long ago, on first seeing Eva, that she would be the proper match for him when he decided to marry, after sowing a crop of very wild oats. She was beautiful, well-born, and would have an immense fortune from her father—all three were requisites that Reginald Hamilton desired in a wife.
In the two months that she stayed in New York, before going abroad, he laid siege to her heart with ardor, wondering why the pretty little rustic seemed so indifferent to all his manly charms, but only piqued to greater devotion by her hauteur.
On her return home, more beautiful, more cultured, more fascinating than before, Reginald Hamilton was genuinely enthralled, and took advantage of his position as Mrs. Hamilton’s stepson to visit the Fifth Avenue home daily, a freedom he could not otherwise have ventured on.