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.