CHAPTER XXX.
LOVE AND PRIDE.
It was useless trying to disguise the truth from her own heart. Miss Winton’s eagerly anticipated visit, instead of adding to Eva’s happiness, only made her more miserable.
It brought back too clearly the dead past—the long weeks and months of wretchedness side by side with the days and hours of ecstatic joy when she had been Rupert’s plighted bride!
They could but talk of old days to each other. Eva was fain to ask questions—Ada glad to answer.
She must know how all her old friends were faring, she had such a kindly interest in them all. She learned that the clever, genial young Doctor Merry had formed a very romantic attachment for a beautiful schoolgirl whom he was to marry when she completed her education.
Ada told her that the kindly, earnest Doctor Bertrand still pursued the even tenor of her way, and that the superintendent had resigned his position and sought a more congenial field of usefulness. As the doctor’s agency in ferreting out Doctor Rupert’s secret, and preventing his marriage, had long since leaked out, he was despised and execrated by many who had formerly respected him, and few missed him from the position he had disgraced. He was supplanted by a less impressionable superintendent, in whose eyes womanhood stood on a higher plane of purity and goodness.
Ada had one little item of personal news. Aunt Susan had left her a small estate that would keep her in comfort, and she need not work at the insane asylum any more.
“You might have left it long ago if you would but have accepted what I wished to do for you!” Eva answered reproachfully.
“Forgive my foolish pride, dear,” laughed Ada quickly, and to turn the subject she spoke aloud a name that was always in their thoughts, though held back from the lips.