"This portrait was in the colonel's father's house, lent him to be
copied, and when he fled he took the original with him, and left the
copy. It was a duel that he fought, and there was something irregular
that he did about it. He went to Virginia, you remember, and while there
he changed his name. Then he came here, and the search for him died out.
The matter was hushed up some way, I suppose."
"And pretended that he belonged to a different race of Archdales in
another part of England," asserted Mrs. Eveleigh, contemptuously.
"Perhaps we should, too, if we had been in his place."
"What! in his place, Elizabeth? Can you even imagine how you would feel
if you had murdered anybody, or about the same as that?"
"Yes."
"Nonsense, my dear. You must have a powerful imagination; I shouldn't
think it was healthy. There's no use, any way, in being so odd."
"No."
"First 'yes,' and then 'no,' and neither of them means anything. But if
you haven't anything to say, I wish you would tell me how those people,
the colonel's father and mother, happened to have a son living that they
didn't know anything about."
Elizabeth, full of remembrance of the time when a human life, even if
her own, had seemed light to her, could not help smiling at Mrs.
Eveleigh's literal interpretation of things.
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