CHAPTER XIII
A SUNDAY NIGHT
They were all together in the parlor at Yorkbury—Joy very still, with her head in her auntie's lap. It was two weeks now since that night when she sat writing in her journal at Washington, and planning so happily for the trip to Manassas that had never been taken.
They had been able to learn little about her father's death as yet. A Paris paper reported, and Boston papers copied, the statement that an American of his name, stopping at an obscure French town, was missing for two days, and found on the third, murdered, robbed, horribly disfigured. Mr. George Breynton had been traveling alone in the interior of the country, and had written home that he should be in this town—St. Pierre—at precisely the time given as the date of the American's death. So his long silence was awfully explained to Joy. The fact that the branch of his firm with which he had frequent business correspondence, had not received the least intelligence of him for several weeks, left no doubt of the mournful truth. Something had gone wrong in the shipping of certain goods, which had required his immediate presence; they had therefore written and telegraphed to him repeatedly, but there had been no reply. Day by day the ominous silence had shaded into alarm, had deepened into suspense, had grown into certainty.
Mr. Breynton had fought against conviction as long as he could, had clung to all possibilities and impossibilities of doubt, but even he had given up all hope.
Dead—dead, without a sign; without one last word to the child waiting for him across the seas; without one last kiss or blessing; dead by ruffian hands, lying now in an unknown, lonely grave. It seemed to Joy as if her heart must break. She tried to fly from the horrible, haunting thought, to forget it in her dreams, to drown it in her books and play. But she could not leave it; it would not leave her. It must be taken down into her heart and kept there; she and it must be always alone together; no one could come between them; no one could help her.
And so there was nothing to do but take that dreary journey home from Washington, come quietly back to Yorkbury, come back without father or mother, into the home that must be hers now, the only one left her in all the wide world; nothing to do but to live on, and never to see him any more, never to kiss him, never to creep up into his arms, or hear his brave, merry voice calling, "Joyce, Joyce," as it used to call about the old home. No one called her Joyce but her father. No one should ever call her so again.