“Oh, no, she isn’t!” cried Fred, running up to give her his good-night kiss before he followed his brother from the room.
“Seriously,” said Mr. Aylwinne, as Florence was putting books and papers together preparatory to following her pupils, “seriously, I never contemplated your taking so much unnecessary trouble with these boys, and I beg that you will not do it any more.”
“Their love amply repays me for it,” she replied.
“Ha!” he said gloomily. “Can you still build upon anything so delusive? Is it not a folly that always ends in disappointment?”
Florence did not answer. In taking the pencil from his pocket, Mr. Aylwinne had dropped something, and now a restless movement of his foot pushed it toward her.
She stooped for it, and, as she raised herself, saw with indescribable feelings that it was a tiny ivory cardcase, her mother’s gift to Frank Dormer before he quitted Heriton Priory.
CHAPTER XIV.
TOO LATE!
Without a word Florence held the cardcase toward its owner. As he took it from her hand he raised it reverently to his lips with apparent unconsciousness of the wounded pride that she was silently struggling to subdue.
“You remember this?” he said. “And the night on which it was given to me?”