“Yes,” Josey answered, beginning at once to calculate how much knowledge of Everard she would confess to. “I knew him when he was in college at Amherst. We lived in Holburton then, a little town over the line in New York, and he was sometimes there, but I have not seen him for a long time. I hope he is well.” “He was the last time I saw him, which was three or four months ago, perhaps more,” Mr. Evarts replied. “He was in the city for a day, and I saw him just a moment. He is working like a dog; sticks to his business like a burr, which is so different from what I thought he’d do, and he so rich, too.” “Is he?” Josephine asked; and Evarts replied: “Why, yes; his father must have been worth half a million, at least, and Ned got the whole, I suppose. There are no other heirs, unless something was given to that girl who lived in the family. Rosamond Hastings was the name, I think.” “Is his father dead?” Josephine asked; and in her voice there was a sharp ring which even stupid Phil Evarts detected and wondered at. “Dead? Yes,” he replied. “He has been dead I should say nearly, if not quite, two years.” Josephine was for a moment speechless. Never in her life had she received so great a shock. That Judge Forrest should have been dead two years and she in ignorance of it seemed impossible, and her first feeling after she began to rally a little was one of incredulity, and she asked: “Are you not mistaken?” “No, I’m not,” Mr. Evarts replied. “I saw Everard in Covington a few weeks after his father’s death, and talked to him of the sickness, which was apoplexy or something of that sort. Anyway, it was sudden, and Ned looked as if he hadn’t a friend in the world. I did not suppose he cared so much for his father, who, I always thought, was a cross old tyrant. I used to visit at Forrest House occasionally years ago, when we were boys, but have not been there since the judge’s death. Ned does not often come to Cincinnati, and as I have been gone most of the time for the last two years, I have heard but little of him.” “How long, did you say, has his father been dead?” Josephine asked; and Mr. Evarts replied: “It must be two years in November, or thereabouts.” “And this Rosamond Hastings who lives there, how old is she, and is he going to marry her?” Josephine asked next; while Evarts thought to himself: “Jealous, I do believe,” but he answered her: “Miss Hastings must be seventeen or eighteen, and when I saw her, five or six years ago, was not so very handsome.” “Yes, thank you,” Josey said, and as she just then saw Mrs. Arnold coming into the salon, she bowed to her new acquaintance, and walked away, with such a tumult in her bosom as she had never before experienced.