"Old love renewed again,
That loved I ever."
It was one of the clearest, loveliest mornings of September.
"They are drowned; perhaps their bodies will be washed ashore. Oh, my poor Caro!" Thus Mrs. Ffolliott, embracing her daughter when she came in from the piazza. She continued at intervals to say, "They are drowned! They are drowned!"
The servants rose and began gaily the duties of Miss Carolyn's wedding-day, but directly they also were enveloped in the gloom. Prudence's mother had an attack of hysteria as soon as she came into the breakfast-room, and it was Carolyn who led her back to her own chamber. It was Carolyn who organized what search was possible, and who sent out messages to towns along the shore. She did it persistently and nervelessly, her face coldly set, her voice clear and even.
Her mother looked at her in helpless wonder; her aunt repeated again and again that she wished she had as little feeling as Caro, but then too much feeling had always been her curse. Caro must "take after" the Ffolliotts.
On the morning of the third day Carolyn sent word to her mother that she would not be down to breakfast; she thought she must have taken cold, and she did not wish anything sent up. So her mother presently appeared in her daughter's room.
"It isn't a cold, it's a fever," the elder woman exclaimed, as she looked in the girl's face.
"Oh, no," said Carolyn; "I'm not so lucky as that; it's only heroines who have brain fevers and die in such circumstances; and I'm not a heroine."
She spoke the truth in part. She only had a lingering, low fever, from which she began to recover when the weather became frosty.