 dream of those words, softly spoken, and would seem
to feel the touch of lips upon her face. But less and less often as the months
went on.
    And now the void in Florence's own heart began again, indeed, to make a
solitude around her. As the image of the father whom she loved had insensibly
become a mere abstraction, so Edith, following the fate of all the rest about
whom her affections had entwined themselves, was fleeting, fading, growing paler
in the distance, every day. Little by little, she receded from Florence, like
the retiring ghost of what she had been; little by little, the chasm between
them widened and seemed deeper; little by little, all the power of earnestness
and tenderness she had shown, was frozen up in bold, angry hardihood with which
she stood, upon the brink of a deep precipice unseen by Florence, daring to look
down.
    There was but one consideration to set against the heavy loss of Edith, and
though it was slight comfort to her burdened heart, she tried to think it some
relief. No longer divided between her affection and duty to the two, Florence
could love both and do no injustice to either. As shadows of her fond
imagination, she could give them equal place in her own bosom, and wrong them
with no doubts.
    So she tried to do. At times, and often too, wondering speculations on the
cause of this change in Edith would obtrude themselves upon her mind and
frighten her; but in the calm of its abandonment once more to silent grief and
loneliness, it was not a curious mind. Florence had only to remember that her
star of promise was clouded in the general gloom that hung upon the house, and
to weep and be resigned.
    Thus living, in a dream wherein the overflowing love of her young heart
expended itself on airy forms, and in a real world where she had experienced
little but the rolling back of that strong tide upon itself, Florence grew to be
seventeen. Timid and retiring as her solitary life had made her, it had not
embittered her sweet temper, or her earnest nature. A child in innocent
simplicity; a woman in her modest self-reliance, and her deep intensity of
feeling; both child and woman seemed at once expressed in her fair face and
fragile delicacy of shape, and gracefully to mingle there; - as if the spring
should be unwilling to depart when summer came, and sought to blend the earlier
beauties of the flowers with their bloom. But in her thrilling voice, in her
calm eyes, sometimes
