AN AWFUL GRIEF.
“Must I really go? Oh, surely, gran’ther did not mean to be so cruel! He is so fiery in his tempers, but presently he will be gentle as a lamb again! Let me wait till he grows calmer! Oh, Heaven, it is midnight, and freezing cold, and I have nowhere to go!” sobbed Eva, clinging to the spinster, who shook her off scornfully, exclaiming:
“Yes, your gran’ther meant every word he said, an’ told me to start you, an’ I’m going to do it! Decent females like Patty, an’ Lydia, and me ain’t going to stay under the same roof with the likes o’ you till morning.”
To do her justice, the woman believed implicitly in the truth of Terry’s story, thinking that Eva’s explanation was a falsehood trumped up on the spur of the moment to save herself.
Her virtuous soul boiled over with indignation against the “little baggage,” as she called her in her thoughts, and she felt that Eva well deserved the punishment that was meted out to her for her sin.
So she shook off the clinging grasp of the little white hands as if they had been contamination, and turned a stony gaze on the big, pleading dark eyes and tremulous red lips of the lovely outcast, adding harshly:
“Don’t say you’ve nowhere to go, for there’s money in that purse to take you to your dad in New York, where your gran’ther told you to go, an’ where you should ha’ been all this time by good rights, instid o’ here, taking the bread out o’ others’ mouths! Go, now, right to the station, an’ you’ll ketch the New York train in time if you walk fast. Good-by, an’ try to be a better girl hereafter. Well, I never!” recoiling from the purse that Eva aimed at her head in a paroxysm of indignant anger as she reached the door, flitting out like a shadow of the autumn night, penniless, despairing, outcast from home and love, with a blight upon her name.
“Let us keep the purse and divide it between us three. Gran’ther needn’t ever know Eva didn’t take it!” Patty cried greedily, heedless that it was her grandfather’s only wealth, the hoarded fifty dollars he had been saving for his funeral expenses that his grandchildren need not be embarrassed by his death.
There was no one to betray them, for the others had gone out to spread the awful news of the tragedy, some to old Doctor Ludington’s, to awake him to the awful truth; others to the town for the coroner and the undertaker.
Meanwhile, Eva, dazed with grief and despair, had flitted out like a shadow of the fateful Hallowe’en into the chilly night toward the stable for Firefly.