“I could not have believed all this Isola, even from your lips,” she said passionately, “if he had not himself told me a lie, and denied my own mother to my face.”
So they journeyed on. Miss Warden had only a few sovereigns in her purse, but Isola seemed to be well supplied with money—
“Where does all your money come from?” asked Amy wonderingly, as she noticed Isola’s well-filled purse. Isola pointed to her ears, despoiled of ornaments—
“You sold them!” exclaimed Amy, “why, they must have represented the savings of at least twenty years,” she added, recollecting the practice of the French peasantry to invest their earnings in jewellery, and especially in earrings, which they exchange for others more valuable as they rise and prosper in the world. Isola bowed her head—
“Could they be yielded to one more worthy, or to one who had a greater right?” she enquired earnestly.
Tears filled Amy’s eyes at the proof of such devotion, and she said no more.
By the time they arrived at Folkestone, Amy had become more calm and collected. She endeavoured to mark out for herself some plan of action—
“I think Isola,” she suggested, “we will telegraph to my father from here that I am safe and well, and that he will hear from me again.”
“Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Isola, “and be stopped by the police on landing at Boulogne! No, no, my child, wait till thou hast safely reached thy mother, then telegraph, write, or do what thou wilt.”
Amy saw the force of the argument, and contended no more, but it was difficult, nay impossible for a girl who had loved her father so passionately as she had, to shut out altogether from her imagination the agony of mind he must be suffering at her unaccountable absence. But what could she do? The difficulties of her position seemed insuperable, and her mind had become so bewildered, she felt she could scarcely now distinguish between right and wrong. Besides, the one all-absorbing intense desire to see her mother had taken such possession of her, that every other feeling was comparatively deadened.
They crossed by the night mail to Boulogne, and thence without delay continued the route to Le Puy. A wearisome journey, and which, to Amy, seemed endless, so long and dreary seemed the hours which kept her apart from her idolised mother. At length it was accomplished, and at the time that the whole country round Harleyford had risen to join in the fruitless search, and Frank Varley and Lord Hardcastle had clasped hands in a solemn vow to rest not day nor night till the wanderer was brought home, Amy was lying in her mother’s arms at the Convent of St. Geneviève, or kneeling by her side kissing her hands, feet, or dress, in a perfect ecstasy and bewilderment of joy that her wildest imaginings were at last realized, and that she had found a mother indeed.
“Ah,” said Amy, here breaking off her narrative and drawing a long breath. “No one could have painted my mother to me as she really was and as I found her. It would have needed a special inspiration to have done so. To describe material beauty, the beauty of form, colour, and outline—yes, it can be done; but to paint the many transparent tints of a sunbeam, or the light and shadow of a handful of the sparkling, rippling stream! It is impossible. When one can be found to do this then may he begin to paint my mother in all her changeful, wondrous beauty. As a very empress, as a star in a dark sky she shone out among the little brown nuns at St. Geneviève. They were all so little, so brown, so old, not a young face among them. Not one of them had been the other side of the mountains for more than thirty years. They were all most kind and courteous, and so indulgent to my mother in all her caprices, treating her almost as a wayward, spoilt child, and only insisting on such matters as were absolutely necessary to keep up the discipline of the convent. In her tiny bare little room, in her coarse brown-grey dress, my mother had passed ten of the best years of her life. It is marvellous to me, knowing her as I now do, that the routine and confinement of a convent life had not broken her spirit and quite worn her out. Oh, papa, I hate routine, I hate discipline, I detest a quiet, orderly life, and yet I feel as if, should I live to be withered, and brown, and old, I should like to come here to these kind little nuns and end my days in peace with them.”
Amy sighed wearily; she often sighed now. The strange events through which she had lately passed had tried her beyond measure, but the bitterest trial of all had been the choice she had been compelled to make between her father and her mother. To believe in the truth of the one was to acknowledge the falsehood of the other, and it was hard indeed for her young, loving heart to choose between the two.
Mr. Warden looked at his daughter anxiously. She was greatly changed, and he could not but feel that his bright, lighthearted Amy would never come back again. Now and then flashes of her old self would shine out, and she would look up in his face with her own laughing eyes, but it was only now and then, and the Amy of today was a sadder, paler, more thoughtful being than the Amy of six months ago.
“Amy, dear,” said Mr. Warden, tenderly, “tell me one thing and I will ask no more questions tonight. Did your mother ever allude in any way to the wrong she once did me, or did you learn
