Roxy Hastings — page 139: what you’re looking at

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130 ROXY HASTINGS. she heard that young Lee was sentenced to death, she ac- cused herself of being the cause of his going into the army, and of all the consequences of that step. Her girlish at- tachment to the young man would long ago have been forgotten but for that unfortunate affair.” “But he was not hung. He escaped,” exclaimed Burr. ‘Did she not know this?” 2 “N+no. I heard some rumor of the kind, but I did not tell her, for she had become so calm and quiet that I—I thought I had better not. I fully intended to tell her by and by.” Burr suspected all that Holden did not tell him, and mortification was his principal emotion. “They will know it at the clubs,” he said, mentally. ‘The penny-a liners will get hold of it; the city will ring with it.” He was not mistaken. The item was served up in one of the morning journals with some very piquant sauce about “January and May—about beauty spurning golden chains, and Mars triumphing over Mammon”—for it was intimated, of course, that the young lady had gone off with her “sol- dier boy.” | Jedediah was utterly crestfallen, and thought that he would rather have lost half his fortune than to have met with such a disgrace, a disgrace of which his fine house, with its costly furniture, was now a standing monument. He took no part in the search for Lucy, but in reply to Mark’s inquiries on the subject he intimated that he was willing to forgive and forget if she returned within a reasonable time, which was very magnanimous on his part, the father said, and far more than the silly girl had any right to expect. Let us see what had in the meantime become of Lucy. About a week before her flight, which she was then pre- meditating, she went to see a Miss Blythe, who had been her schoolmate and room mate at a fashionable seminary in the city, and of whose earnest, genuine friendship she had had many convincing proofs. To her, after exacting solemn pledges of secrecy, she told, with many tears, her whole sad story, though, unfor- tunately, suppressing the name of her. lost lover, and the particulars of his supposed dreadful death, on which she could not dwell an instant without unspeakable horror. He had joined the army and lost his life. This was all that she told her friend of his fate, but on the other points she was unreserved in her communications. ; Gomicbooks.co