Heedless of the covert and sneering smiles of Shafto, Florian, from time to time, drew forth the photo of Dulcie, and her shining lock of red-golden hair, his sole links between the past and the present; and already he felt as if a score of years had lapsed since they sat side by side upon the fallen tree.
Then, that he might give his whole thoughts to Dulcie, he affected to sleep; but Shafto did not sleep for hours. He sat quietly enough with his face in shadow, his travelling-cap of tweed-check pulled well down over his watchful and shifty grey-green eyes, the lamp overhead giving a miserable glimmer suited to the concealment of expression and thought; and as the swift train sped northward, the cousins addressed not a word to each other concerning those they had left behind, what was before them, or anything else.
After a time, Shafto really slept—slept the slumber which is supposed to be the reward of the just and conscientious, but which is much more often enjoyed by those who have no conscience at all.
Dulcie contrived to despatch a letter to Florian detailing the outrage to which she had been subjected by Shafto; but time passed on, and, for a reason we shall give in its place, the letter never reached him.
Again and again she recalled and rehearsed her farewell with Florian, and thought regretfully of his passionate pride, and desperate poverty too probably, if he quarrelled with Shafto; and she still seemed to see his beautiful dark eyes, dim with unshed tears, while her own welled freely and bitterly.
When could they meet again, if ever, and where and how? Her heart and brain ached with these questions.
Dulcie did not bemoan her fate, though her cheek paled a little, and she felt—even at her early years—as if life seemed over and done with, and in her passionate love for the absent, that existence alone was left to her, and so forth.
And as she was her father's housekeeper now, kept the keys and paid all the servants, paid all accounts and made the preserves, he was in no way sorry that the young men were gone; that the 'aimless philandering,' as he deemed it, had come to an end; and that much would be attended to in his cosy little household which he suspected—but unjustly—had been neglected hitherto.
To Dulcie, the whole locality of her native place, the breezy moors, the solitary hills, the mysterious Druid pillars and logan stones, the rocky shore, and the pretty estuary of the Yealm, where they had been wont to boat and fish for pilchards in summer and autumn, were all full of the haunting presence of the absent—the poor but proud and handsome lad who from boyhood, yea from infancy, had loved her, and who now seemed to have slipped out of her existence.
Spring melted into summer; golden sunshine flooded hill and dale, and lit up the waters of the Erm, the Yealm, and the far-stretching Channel, tinting with wondrous gleams and hues the waves that rolled upon the shore, or boiled about the Mewstorre Rock, and the sea-beaten promontory of Revelstoke; but to Dulcie the glory was gone from land and water: she heard no more, by letter or otherwise, of the love of her youth; he seemed to have dropped utterly out of her sphere; and though mechanically she gathered the fragrant leaves of the bursting June roses—the Marshal Neil and Gloire de Dijon—and treasured them carefully in rare old china jars and vases, a task in which she had often been assisted by Florian, she felt and thought—'Ichabod! Ichabod! the glory has departed!'