She had met at least a welcome there, but she was ill and sinking with fatigue, so she scarcely heeded anything. For a week they doubted if she would live to take up the weary burden of her shadowed life again.
But they knew that she was cured of her mental illness—knew it well without her pitiful remonstrances in the delirium of fever.
“Little Eva is not crazy now! Gran’ther has forgiven her, and she is happy!”
Doctor Bertrand shrugged her shapely shoulders when the attendant told her the tales of Eva’s violence she had heard at Stony Ledge.
“They were invented for the purpose of getting rid of her by her heartless relations. They hated her for her beauty and sweetness!” she said, for Doctor Rupert had confessed to her that he knew more of little Eva than he seemed to at first.
He had visited once in that neighborhood, he said, and people had told him how the young girl was domineered over by her selfish cousins, and debarred from all the pleasures of youth, because they were jealous of her beautiful face and winsome ways. He had seen her out riding sometimes on Firefly, her pony, and she had looked to him the prettiest thing alive. He knew that every young man in the country would have liked to court her if he had had the chance.
“But she was never allowed to go with any of them, and as for Doctor Ludington, who was said to be her lover, I have heard that she had never spoken to him in her life,” he added.
“Then you have seen the young doctor? Was he handsome?” asked Doctor Bertrand, quite as eagerly as any romantic young girl.
“Oh, men never think each other handsome!” he replied carelessly, with an averted face that she might not notice the flush on his cheek.
Rupert Ludington had always secretly worshiped the lovely girl from her childhood, without the slightest hope of ever dispelling the shadow that lay between them—a gulf that had opened before he was born, and continued to widen with the flight of years.