CHAPTER XXVII.
AFTERWARD.
It will not take many words to bring our narrative to a close. The sensation in Lakeview the next day, indeed, throughout the entire country, was tremendous. Here was a condemned man not guilty at all; a man whose name had never once been connected with the murder had done the deed, and he was already dead. The newspapers printed long comments upon the case, and published sharp editorials on the instability of circumstantial evidence, and in every store and public place the case was vigorously discussed.
There was one man who was thoroughly disgusted with both the news and himself, and that was Jack Hull. He had woven an elaborate web about Henry Cross, and that was brushed aside as a broom might clear away the web of a spider.
He tried to reason the matter in a way to lighten the cloud of contempt which he felt he had brought upon himself, but public feeling had gone over to Cross in a great tidal wave. Even the prosecuting attorney would not listen to him, and he never learned the true significance of the slip of paper he had found addressed to Maud Willowby.
Henry Cross himself could not, at first, realize his good fortune. He had spent days in his narrow cell, waiting for his sentence, which he knew could be but one thing; and when they threw open the door, and said that a man had confessed the murder, and he would be free just as soon as the necessary papers could be signed, he sat like one dazed, refusing, at first, to believe that his ears had not deceived him.
There was no trouble in bringing forth evidence against Dick Harding, now that he had confessed. Half a dozen people remembered him at the race track; and one man had seen Chesterbrook thrash him with a carriage whip; and still another had seen him in the vicinity of the bachelor apartments on the morning of the murder. All these things strengthened the confession, until it stood as it was meant to stand.
On the day after his release, Henry Cross received a note from Maud Willowby.
“I am glad, from the bottom of my heart, that you are free,” she wrote. “Some day I mean to tell you all—but not now.”
His heart leaped with pain when he thought how he had sometimes thought she might be guilty. He went up to the Willowby mansion a week later, but found that the colonel and his daughter had gone South, and would not be back until the following spring. Later on he heard that they had taken Violet Harding with them, and also a little boy, whom nobody seemed to know.
Cross tried to settle down to work on the proposed new railroad line, but that seemed irksome. He tried it for two weeks, and then gave it up. Three days later he, too, went South, after having been very particular to worry Nancy Motley into giving him Maud’s address.
The two met in an orange grove in Florida, and while Violet Harding went off with little Roy, and the colonel dozed away in an easy-chair on the veranda, numerous explanations ensued, which must have been entirely satisfactory to both parties, for when they came back from a long stroll beneath the palms it was arm in arm—heart to heart—and each face was beaming with smiles.
“Yes,” Maud was saying, “Violet is to stay with me as a sort of companion. She has had a good education, and I have induced her to become Roy’s teacher. He has been much neglected, and needs some one to help him along constantly.”
“And I’ll take a hand at that, too,” was the reply of Henry Cross. “Oh, we’ll all get along famously when you and I are——”
“Hush!” she whispered, blushing deeply. “Somebody might hear you, and—and—I’m not quite prepared yet, you know.”
“Never mind, darling,” he made answer. “I think I can well afford to wait—a little.”
THE END.
“For the Man She Adored” is the title of the next volume, No. 990, in the New Eagle Series. It is from the pen of Julia Edwards, an author whose skill has been widely praised. In the forthcoming novel you get a charming love story, woven through numerous dramatic situations and abounding in sparkling dialogue and pleasing surprises.