THE CROMPTONS



" that I, JAMES CROMPTON, am a coward and a sneak
and a villain, and have lived a lie for forty years,
hiding a secret I was too proud to divulge at first,
and which grew harder and harder to tell as time
went on and people held me so high as the soul of
honor and rectitude. Honor! There isn't a hair
of it on my head! I broke the heart of an innocent
girl, and left her to die alone. AMY EUDORA SMITH
is my own daughter, the lawful child of my marriage
with EUDORA HARRIS, which took place December
-, I8-, on the Hardy Plantation, Fulton County,
in Georgia, several miles from Atlanta."
  Up to this point Howard had been standing, but
now the floor seemed to rise up and strike him in the
face. Sitting down in the nearest chair, he breathed
hard for a moment, and then went on with what the
Colonel called his CONFESSION, which he had not had
courage to make verbally while living.
  When in college he had for his room-mate Tom
Hardy from Atlanta. The two were fast friends,
and when the Colonel was invited to visit Georgia
he did so gladly. Some miles from the town was the
plantation owned by the Hardys. This the Colonel
visited in company with his friend. A small log-
house on a part of the farm was rented to a Mr.
Brown, a perfectly respectable man, but ignorant
and coarse.  His family consisted of himself and
wife and son, and daughter Mary, a pretty girl of
twenty, and a cousin from Florida, Eudora Harris,
a beautiful girl of sixteen, wholly uneducated and
shy as a bird. There was about her a wonderful
fascination for the Colonel, who went with his friend
several times to the Brown's, and mixed with them
familiarly for the sake of the girl whose eyes wel-



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