"Poor child! Don't let's talk of this any longer. When you are stronger, your mind will be stronger, and you won't have these fancies."
Carolyn did not reply to these words. She lay silently in her chair, gazing off to the line where the horizon met the ocean.
She was thinking, suddenly, that it was here on the piazza that she had been sitting when Leander had found the ring that Prudence had given to Rodney; and then Rodney had come and had asked her, Carolyn Ffolliott, to be his wife.
Well, it was all over. But she would not put on black because her lover was faithless.
As the weeks went on, nothing more was heard of the two who went out in the Vireo that night; that is, nothing was heard by the people at Savin Hill. But they went nowhere, and saw only a very few friends; and as the season grew on towards winter they saw fewer and fewer. The neighbors had gone back to their city homes. Prudence's mother had left them for the South.
Flurries of snow began sometimes to hide the ocean from the girl, who sat often at her chamber window. Then came three or four perfect days in November, the Indian summer. It was on one of these days that Mrs. Ffolliott entered the room where her daughter sat by the hearth. Carolyn was reading, or seemed to be reading. She held a book in her hand nearly always when she was not at work.
Mrs. Ffolliott had a copy of a Boston daily paper, and the paper fluttered and rustled in her hand as she came forward nervously.
"Carolyn," she said, in a high voice, "you just read that; you might as well read it first at last. The strange part of it is that we haven't seen it before. Of course other folks have seen it. And they wouldn't tell us. I call that unkind. I happened upon this paper in a waste-basket. It had never been unfolded. I don't know what we've done to have such a thing happen to us. I'm glad you held out about not putting on black. How ridiculous we should have looked, going around in black!"
While she talked Mrs. Ffolliott held the paper beyond her daughter's reach, though the latter extended her hand for it.
"Let me see it," said Carolyn, authoritatively.