“All about the great sensation—the woman with a past!”
“Terrible scandal in high life!”
“Read about the Southern vendetta and the double tragedy, and the pretty girl that went mad for love!”
It was the last that attracted the attention of a loutish fellow gawking about on a street corner so that he bought a newspaper and retired into a cheap restaurant to discuss it with his breakfast.
And as he read his eyes began to bulge and his chin to drop, so that his large mouth gaped half open long before he muttered:
“By gum! I knows ’em all, every one! It’s Doc Ludington, Pat Groves and them, for I seen little Eva last week with a big, handsome man they said she was ’gaged to marry this week! Now what for did that sneakin’ Pat want to come and spile sport for, by gum! Ain’t she done devilment enuff already with her joking?”
His brow grew dark as he remembered the wretchedness he had endured in keeping the twins’ miserable secret of Hallowe’en night.
He began to vaguely wonder if it had been necessary, if he might not have fared better confessing the truth and staying at home?
His thoughts flew to Doctor Ludington and the night he had succored him from misery and starvation.
“What’s that he said, I wonder, about doing good deeds and finding comfort in ’em? I might a-done a good deed oncet if I’d told the truth, and saved people from thinking bad about poor little Eva! I told a lie, and the mischief keeps going on and on, and spreading away out here in New York. I wisht now I never had of done it!”