She had long since ceased to expect any letter from or tidings of Florian. She began to think that perhaps, amid the splendour of his new relations, he had forgotten her. Well, it was the way of the world.
Never would she forget the day she quitted her old home. Her father's hat, his coat and cane were in the hall; all that he had used and that belonged to him were still there, to bring his presence before her with fresh poignancy, and to impress upon her that she was fatherless, all but friendless, and an orphan.
The superstitious people about Revelstoke now remembered that in Lawyer Carlyon's garden, blossom and fruit had at the same time appeared on more than one of his apple-trees, a certain sign of coming death to one of his household. But who can tell in this ever-shifting world what a day may bring forth!
One evening—she never forgot it—she had been visiting her father's grave, and was slowly quitting the secluded burial-ground, when a man like a soldier approached her in haste.
'Florian!' She attempted to utter his name, but it died away on her bloodless lips.
CHAPTER XVI.
''TIS BUT THE OLD, OLD STORY.'
A poet says:
'Not by appointment do we meet delight
And joy: they need not our expectancy.
But round some corner in the streets of life,
They on a sudden clasp us with a smile.'
Florian it was who stood before her, but though he gazed at her earnestly, wistfully, and with great pity in his tender eyes as he surveyed her pale face and deep mourning, he made no attempt to take the hands she yearningly extended towards him. She saw that he was in the uniform of a private soldier, over which he wore a light dust-coat as a sort of disguise, but there was no mistaking his glengarry—that head-dress which is odious and absurd for English and Irish regiments, and which in his instance bore a brass badge—the sphinx, for Egypt.