A long embrace, and he was gone to catch the inexorable train. She was again alone, and for the first time she perceived that the sun had set, that the waves looked black as they rounded Revelstoke promontory, and that all the landscape had grown dark, desolate, and dreary.
What a hopeless future seemed to stretch before these two creatures, so young and so loving!
Florian was gone—gone to serve as a private soldier on the burning coast of Africa. It seemed all too terrible, too dreadful to think of.
'Every morning and evening I shall pray for you, Florian,' wailed the girl in her heart; 'pray that you may be happy, good, and rich, and—and that we shall yet meet in heaven if we never meet on earth.'
On the second morning after this separation, when Dulcie was pillowed in sleep, and the rising sun was shining brightly on the waves that rolled in Cawsand Bay and danced over the Mewstone, a great white 'trooper' came out of Plymouth Sound under sail and steam, with the blue-peter flying at its foremasthead, her starboard side crowded with red coats, all waving their caps and taking a farewell look at Old England—the last look it proved to many—and, led by Bob Edgehill, a joyous, rackety, young private of the Warwickshire, hundreds of voices joined chorusing:
'Merrily, my lads, so ho!
They may talk of a life at sea,
But a life on the land
With sword in hand
Is the life, my lads, for me!'
But there was one young soldier whose voice failed him in the chorus, and whose eyes rested on Stoke Point and the mouth of the Yealm till these and other familiar features of the coast melted into the widening Channel.
Dulcie was roused to exertion from the stupor of grief that had come upon her by tidings that a situation had been found for her as companion—one in which she would have to make herself useful, amiable, and agreeable in the family of a lady of rank and wealth, to whom she would be sent by influential friends of Mr. Pentreath in London.
The poor girl thought tearfully how desolate was her lot now, cast to seek her bread among utter strangers; and if she became ill, delicate, or unable to work, what would become of her?
Her separation from Florian seemed now greater than ever; but, as Heine has it: