Miss Lydia Sampson. She had no more reticence than
sunshine or wind, or any other elemental thing. How much of this was due
to conditions it would be hard to say; certainly there was no
"reticence" in her silence as to her neighbors' affairs; she simply
didn't know them! Nobody ever dreamed of confiding in Lydia Sampson! And
she could not be reticent about her own affairs because they were
inherently public. When she was a girl she broke her engagement to Mr.
William Rives two weeks before the day fixed for the wedding--and the
invitations were all out! So of course everybody knew _that_. To be
sure, she never said why she broke it, but all Old Chester knew she
hated meanness, and felt sure that she had given her William the choice
of being generous or being jilted--and he chose the latter. As she grew
older the joyous, untidy makeshifts of a poverty which was always
hospitable and never attempted to be genteel, stared you in the face the
minute you entered the house; so everybody knew she was poor. Years
later, her renewed engagement to Mr. Rives, and his flight some ten
minutes before the marriage ceremony, were known to everybody because we
had all been invited to the wedding, which cost (as we happened to know,
because we had presented her with just exactly that amount) _a hundred
dollars_! At the sight of such extravagance the thrifty William turned
tail and ran, and we gave thanks and said he was a scoundrel to make us
thankful, though, with the exception of Doctor Lavendar, we deplored the
extravagance as much as he did! As for Doctor Lavendar, he said that it
was a case of the grasshopper and the ant; "but Lydia is a gambling
grasshopper," said Doctor Lavendar; "she took tremendous chances, for
suppose the party _hadn't_ scared William off?"

So, obviously, anything which was personal to Miss Lydia was public
property. She simply couldn't be secretive.

Then, suddenly, and in the open (so to speak) of her innocent candor, a
Secret pounced upon her! At first Old Chester didn't know that there was
a secret. We merely knew that on a rainy December day (this was about
eight months after William had turned tail) she was seen to get into the
Mercer stage, carrying a carpetbag in one hand and a bandbox in the
other. This was surprising enough--for why should Lydia Sampson spend
her money on going to Mercer? Yet it was not so surprising as the fact
that she did not come back from Mercer! And even that was a comparative