It is needless to chronicle the effect of the news of their daughter's flight, upon Mr. and Mrs. Lamotte.
That is a thing we can all understand; we can picture it for ourselves.
Mrs. Lamotte shut herself up in her chamber, and refused to be comforted by family or friends. Mr. Lamotte, bitterly grieved, terribly shocked, did all that a father could do, which was in effect, nothing.
One day, the mail brought them a copy of the marriage certificate of Sybil Lamotte and John Burrill; but that was all. Where the fugitives had gone, could not be discovered.
Francis Lamotte went about as usual; with a little more of haughtiness, a little more reserve, and just a tinge of melancholy in his manner. He took Constance at her word, and came and went very much as of old, but was so watchful over himself, so subdued, and as she thought, improved in manner, that she declared confidentially to her aunt that he had become "really quite a comfortable person to have in one's parlor." She ceased snubbing him altogether, and received him with the frank graciousness that used to charm Doctor Heath; assuring herself, often, that "trouble was improving poor Frank."
Evan Lamotte was Evan Lamotte still. Now drunk, now sober; a little more furious and ready to quarrel than usual, when in his cups; a little more taciturn and inclined to solitude in his sober moments.
Doctor Heath went about among his patients, wearing his usual cheery smile, speaking the usual comforting word, smoking, philosophizing, rallying his friends, satirizing his enemies, genial, independent, inscrutable as ever. He never called at Wardour Place, of course. He never sought an opportunity for meeting or seeing Constance, and he never avoided her; altogether, his conduct, from a romantic standpoint, was very reprehensible.
And Constance; perhaps of them all, these three days had effected the greatest change in her, as any chain of startling or strange events must, in a measure, change the current of thought and feeling in a life that has hitherto floated under a roseate cloud, on a sea without a ripple. She had been rocked by storm waves; had seen a bark shipwrecked close beside her; had even encountered mutiny in her own craft; when the lull came, and she drifted quietly, she found herself forever face to face with the facts that sorrow and trouble were abroad in the land, that crime existed outside of the newspapers; that heartache and self dissatisfaction were possibilities, and that even a queen absolute might come under the shadow of each and all. Not that Constance had never been aware of all these things, but we never can realize what we have never experienced.
We look sadly sympathetic, and murmur "poor things," when we see some mourner weeping over a dead loved one, but we never comprehend the sorrow until we bury our own dead.
Constance had loved Sybil Lamotte as a sister; she thought and sorrowed not a little over the strange freak Fate had played with her friend's life, and she wondered often if Doctor Heath had really lost all regard for her; she knew, as what woman does not, that a warm regard had once existed; and she assured herself that whether he had or not, was a matter of no consequence to her. "She had not the slightest interest in Doctor Heath," so she told Mrs. Aliston, and, like him, she never sought nor avoided a meeting.