“That will be easy enough. Tell him he was the cause of all the trouble, and that he will be hung for murder if it is ever found out.”
Then they turned back again to listen to Gran’ther Groves, seeking to embarrass his decision by crying out:
“No wonder she hated poor Terry and was always so mean to him! Doctor Ludington was making love to her all the while, setting her against our poor brother.”
“Yes; no doubt she went to meet him this afternoon when she rode out, to tell him to come and see her to-night, as every one would be away; only poor gran’ther fast asleep in his room. She did not count on Terry’s coming in the nick of time and catching them.”
In the midst of their coarse denunciations Eva could but think, with a swelling heart, of how coldly and scornfully she had passed the young doctor in her canter on Firefly. Many times had they thus met and parted, never exchanging a word until to-night, and now—oh, the pity of it!—he lay there dead for the sake of one who had never given him a smile or a kind word!
Her heart swelled within her almost to bursting. She felt a passionate regret surging over her that she had not been friends always with the handsome young man that, as boy and man, had been their neighbor.
She remembered how all the girls had raved over him when he graduated at the West Virginia University, two years before, and succeeded to his father’s practice, the old man retiring in his favor. He was very young, scarcely older than Terry; handsome, and manly, and winning. Every girl in the neighborhood except three had set their caps at him.
It all rushed over Eva now with keen regret that she had been so scornful to one whom fate had destined to lay down his life for her sake.
She comprehended soon that the kiss and the kind words she had given to him in his dying hour were being used to her disadvantage now, but it seemed to her that, not to have saved her life would she have repented or taken back her impulsive farewell, for if she lived to be a hundred she would never forget the look of love surprised that shone in his dark-blue eyes the moment of his death.
“How strange; how very strange! Perhaps he did not hate me, after all!” she thought, in wonder, and turned back to her grandfather, pleading: