“Late that night Hopeful come up here lookin’ as if she had seen a ghost. ‘Good heavens, Betsey,’ she says, ‘we’ve brought Abby Clergy home a ravin’ maniac!’ Well, I didn’t know what to answer, but she went on to tell me that just before the weddin’ was to take place—on Easter Monday night—and all New York was invited to come and see an American girl become an Eyetalian countess, didn’t that scoundrel clear out and they find he had a wife and five children hidin’ up in Michigan and that he wasn’t nothin’ but a common barber! It was a grand swindle—you know this idea of our girls marryin’ them noblemen was kind of new those days and nobody was smart enough to ask all the questions that they would have done if it was to happen now. It seems he had taken a lot of Miss Abby’s jewelry and she had loaned him money, him tellin’ her his ‘allowance’ was bein’ held up and such truck, and she, poor innocent lamb, believin’ him!
“They didn’t try to do nothin’ to him; the shame was enough to bear without goin’ any further. Hopeful said Mr. Clergy walked the floor all that night, and, finally, he told his lawyer, ‘Let the wretch go, thank God the girl was spared the farce of a marriage.’ So I guess the count and his wife and five children took the Clergy money and opened a shavin’ parlor somewheres in Michigan and I suppose God took care of him when He got around to it.
“But it took Abby Clergy’s reason for the time bein’, and it killed her Ma. When word came about him bein’ false and all, Abby was tryin’ on her weddin’ dress and she fainted dead away. When she come to and they undressed her, she fought ’em like a tiger and kept screamin’ out that it was not so. Finally, they got her calmed down and the doctor came and she told him she never wanted to see any one again; she wanted to go and live for a whole year at the old summer home at Birge’s Lake, where she thought she could forget her sorrow and bury her shame. But she didn’t want to see nor speak to any one—not even her father or mother; she just wanted Hopeful to stay with her.
“I guess if she had asked for the moon they’d have tried to have got it for her. So they packed up her things, and she and Hopeful came all the way to the Corners by team, and Ali Baba hurried up and made new fires in the house and Miss Abby was put to bed as helpless as a newborn child.