Susan threw herself before her cousin.
“Dear Julia, where are you going?”
Receiving no reply, she cried more urgently than before:
“Julia, what are you about to do? What is this Lieutenant Mason to you?”
“My husband!” she answered, as she repulsed her gentle cousin, and swept proudly from the room.
CHAPTER VII.
DESERTED.
With a silent grasp of the hand, Susan and Florence parted, for the latter did not feel that her intimacy warranted any inquiries into Julia’s affairs, and she was conscious that she had stayed from her father’s side too long already. He had been sleeping for some time, the servant told her when she entered the house; and she never knew whether he thoroughly comprehended the faltering tale she told him when he awoke, for the illness he had long striven to keep at bay now prostrated him, and he lay for weeks in a distressing state of weakness. From this he slowly recovered, beneath the unwearying care of his daughter; but his mind was irreparably affected, and his memory of the past so confused that it is difficult to say what he remembered and what he had forgotten.
The lonely Florence bore up bravely through this time of trial. If saddening thoughts of those happy days when she wandered hand in hand with Frank Dormer beside the Coquet ever came to trouble her, they were quickly banished; and even her mother’s journal, which had so long fed her hopes of his return, was laid at the bottom of her desk, that she might not be tempted to read and ponder over it.
As soon as Mr. Heriton was sufficiently recovered to bear the change which his medical man prescribed as absolutely necessary for his complete restoration to health, Florence went to consult her friend Susan Denham. She must choose some locality for her new home where there was a prospect of employment, and in her utter inexperience she gladly availed herself of Susan’s greater knowledge of the world.