Perhaps it was that at sixty-five years of age he was less able to bear even a lesser grief; but those who watched him closely, declared that he seemed as much dejected by his daughter’s absence as he could well have been by her death. Even now, that he paces up and down the broad terrace, with the landscape stretching wide before him, and melting vaguely away under that veil of crimson glory shed upon all things by the sinking sun; even now that he hourly, nay, almost momentarily, expects to clasp his only child in his arms, Archibald Floyd seems rather nervously anxious than joyfully expectant.
He looks again and again at his watch, and pauses in his walk to listen to Beckenham church clock striking eight; his ears are preternaturally alert to every sound, and give him instant warning of carriage-wheels far off upon the wide high-road. All the agitation and anxiety he has felt for the last week has been less than the concentrated fever of this moment. Will it pass on, that carriage, or stop at the lodge-gates? Surely his heart could never beat so loud save by some wondrous magnetism of fatherly love and hope. The carriage stops. He hears the clanking of the gates; the crimson-tinted landscape grows dim and blurred before his eyes, and he knows no more till a pair of impetuous arms are twined about his neck, and Aurora’s face is hidden on his shoulder.
It was a paltry hired carriage which Miss Floyd arrived in, and it drove away as soon as she had alighted, and the small amount of luggage she brought had been handed to the eager servants. The banker led his child into the study, where they had held that long conference fourteen months before. A lamp burned upon the library table, and it was to this light that Archibald Floyd led his daughter.
A year had changed the girl to a woman—a woman with great hollow black eyes, and pale haggard cheeks. The course of study at the Parisian finishing school had evidently been too hard for the spoiled heiress.
“Aurora, Aurora,” the old man cried piteously, “how ill you look! how altered! how—”
She laid her hand lightly yet imperiously upon his lips.
“Don’t speak of me,” she said, “I shall recover; but you—you, father—you too are changed.”
She was as tall as her father, and, resting her hands upon his shoulders, she looked at him long and earnestly. As she looked, the tears welled slowly up to her eyes which had been dry before, and poured silently down her haggard cheeks.
“My father, my devoted father,” she said in a broken voice, “if my heart was made of adamant, I think it might break when I see the change in this beloved face.”
The old man checked her with a nervous gesture, a gesture almost of terror.
“Not one word, not one word, Aurora,” he said hurriedly; “at least, only one. That person—he is dead?”
“He is.”
III
What Became of the Diamond Bracelet
Aurora’s relatives were not slow to exclaim upon the change for the worse which a twelvemonth in Paris had made in their young kinswoman. I fear that the Demoiselles Lespard suffered considerably in reputation amongst the circle round Felden Woods from Miss Floyd’s impaired good looks. She was out of spirits too, had no appetite, slept badly, was nervous and hysterical, no longer took any interest in her dogs and horses, and was altogether an altered creature. Mrs. Alexander Floyd declared it was perfectly clear that these cruel Frenchwomen had worked poor Aurora to a shadow: the girl was not used to study, she said; she had been accustomed to exercise and open air, and no doubt had pined sadly in the close atmosphere of a schoolroom.
But Aurora’s was one of those impressionable natures which quickly recover from any depressing influence. Early in September Lucy Floyd came to Felden Woods, and found her handsome cousin almost entirely recovered from the drudgery of the Parisian pension, but still very loth to talk much of that seminary. She answered Lucy’s eager questions very curtly; said that she hated the Demoiselles Lespard and the Rue Saint-Dominique, and that the very memory of Paris was disagreeable to her. Like most young ladies with black eyes and blue-black hair, Miss Floyd was a good hater; so Lucy forbore to ask for more information upon what was so evidently an unpleasant subject to her cousin. Poor Lucy had been mercilessly well educated; she spoke half a dozen languages, knew all about the natural sciences, had read Gibbon, Niebuhr, and Arnold, from the titlepage to the printer’s name, and looked upon the heiress as a big brilliant dunce; so she quietly set down Aurora’s dislike to Paris to that young lady’s distaste for tuition, and thought little more about it. Any other reasons for Miss Floyd’s almost shuddering horror of her Parisian associations lay far beyond Lucy’s simple power of penetration.
The fifteenth of September was Aurora’s birthday, and Archibald Floyd determined upon this, the nineteenth anniversary of his daughter’s first appearance on this mortal scene, to give an entertainment, whereat his county neighbours and town acquaintance might alike behold and admire the beautiful heiress.
Mrs. Alexander came to Felden Woods to superintend the preparations for this birthday ball. She drove Aurora and Lucy into town to order the supper and the band, and to choose dresses and wreaths for the young ladies. The banker’s heiress was sadly out of place in a milliner’s showroom; but she had that rapid judgment as to colour, and that perfect taste in form, which bespeak the soul of an artist; and while poor mild Lucy was giving endless trouble, and tumbling innumerable boxes of flowers, before she could find any headdress in harmony with her rosy cheeks and golden hair, Aurora, after one brief glance at the bright parterres of painted cambric, pounced upon a crown-shaped garland of vivid scarlet berries, with
