"
Eddie's mother studied the card again, and sighed gently. "I
hope," she said, "that Eddie won't get into bad company."
After that our postal cards ceased. I wish that there was
some way of telling this story so that the end wouldn't come in the
middle. But there is none. In our town we know the news before
the paper comes out, and we only read it to verify what we have
heard. So that long before the paper came out in the middle of the
afternoon we had been horrified by the news of Eddie Houghton's
desertion and suicide. We stopped one another on Main Street to
talk about it, and recall how boyish and handsome he had looked in
his white duck coat, and on that last day just as the 10:I5 pulled
out. "It don't seem hardly possible, does it?" we demanded of each
other.
But when Eddie's mother brought out the letters that had come
after our postal cards had ceased, we understood. And when they
brought him home, and we saw him for the last time, all those of us
who had gone to school with him, and to dances, and sleigh rides,
and hayrack parties, and picnics, and when we saw the look on his
face--the look of one who, walking in a sunny path has stumbled
upon something horrible and unclean--we forgave him his neglect of
us, we forgave him desertion, forgave him the taking of his own
life, forgave him the look that he had brought into his mother's
eyes.
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