given up all hope that he married Dolores Moreno. I think Mr. Heron felt
tender over us children because of his lost little one. After leaving us
in Russia at school for a while, and a year in England, to learn the
language better than we knew it, another year in France and another in
Italy (in families whom he paid to educate and take care of us) he must
have had a longing to see what we were like. He and Dolores, his wife,
came abroad, and brought us back to America with them, much against
Dolores' will, I know. I was nearly eighteen, and I realized the first
minute we met that Dolores was going to hate me. We went straight to a
house near Albuquerque, which belongs to Mrs. Heron. Her brother Louis
always lived there. He was an invalid, you know; about a year younger
than Dolores; something wrong with his heart, and almost a
hunchback--but oh, what a handsome face! When he took a violent fancy to
me her one thought was to get me out of his way. Louis had money of his
own. He was rich, and I suppose Dolores was afraid I might try to marry
him, as I hadn't a penny. It was bad enough for her that Mr. Heron
should have a tenderness for me, because of his lost child; but that
Louis should love me was more than she could stand. I was sent to a
boarding-school, and when I was twenty I began to teach. Dolores didn't
like Stephen, either. She grudged every penny her husband spent for us.
"Mr. Heron used his influence, and got Stephen work in Los Angeles as a
reporter on a newspaper, when he was only eighteen. He was tall and
handsome, and could pass for two years older at least. I was very
unhappy at this time, for I'd begun to worry about Stephen. I was sure
he was keeping some secret from me. But I found out nothing till the
crash came. Oh, Roger, it was horrible. He'd fallen under the influence
of those anarchists--those dynamiters, who had been terrorizing all
America for years. They'd persuaded him that they were noble reformers.
Poor Stephen was a useful tool. He never did any of the dynamiting with
his own hands, but he used to make bombs, and carry them from place to
place, and take letters it wasn't thought safe to send through the post.
It was the blowing-up of the _Times_ buildings in Los Angeles and all
those innocent men being killed that sickened him, he confessed
afterward, when at last he opened his heart to me. But he was too deep
in to free himself. It's now two years ago that the break happened, and
all our life collapsed--Stephen's and mine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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