When his short sensational trial for murder was over and he had served out the three months’ sentence for manslaughter, he came out into the world again with a new purpose.
Once, led by the elusive light of tremulous hope, he had vowed to make Eva Somerville his own, defying the vendetta of hate that had held their youth so sternly apart.
He had loved her to madness; he was stunned by her pride and scorn that refused to forgive the deception he had practiced for both their sakes, that they might defy fate and be happy.
With her last frenzied words to him, hope had fallen dead in his heart. He felt she was lost to him forever.
When the prison doors clanged behind him he came forth a free man with a new purpose in his mind—to forget.
For years he had been a slave to beauty’s spell, with a dream of love in his heart. All was over now, the hopes, the fears, and the longings. He said to himself over and over that he must never look again upon the fatally fair face that had wrought his undoing. He must thrust her from his heart, he must forget.
He knew that Eva’s father had claimed her and taken her away to a new life of ease and luxury, where her wonderful beauty would find its appropriate setting, and he was generously glad that it was so. For him, too, life had altered in many ways.
From being just comfortably well off, the Ludingtons were on the way to become millionaires owing to the abundant flow of their several oil wells.
He would not have to practice his profession any more unless he chose, and he decided to seek in travel and foreign study surcease for a tortured heart.
His parents did not say him nay. They realized that it would not be well for him to locate at Fernside again. It would be too painful, with its associations.