He went down and asked the housekeeper if Mrs. Leith had gone away in the carriage, and she answered that the lady had walked, and the maid had accompanied her.
"I cannot go south until I have found them," he said to himself, sadly. "Poor little Golden, poor Gertrude."
Before the next day he had visited every depot and every wharf by which they might have left the city, but he had learned nothing. The next day after he inserted a personal in the Herald:
"To Gertrude:—Return with Golden. Her true story is known and she is freely forgiven. Anxiously,
R. L."
But the two for whom that yearning cry was written were fated never to behold it. And the dreary winter days came and went while he waited for tidings, filled with the heart-sickness of a great despair.
[CHAPTER XXXIX.]
While the winter snow still whirled in blinding drifts through the streets of New York, the sun shone, the flowers bloomed, the birds sang around old Glenalvan Hall in far-away Florida.
Old Dinah crooned her quaint revival hymns in the sunny doorway of the kitchen, and her old master dozed in the bright, bay-window among the pots of fragrant flowers.
It was February, and hints of the nearing spring were in the air that sighed softly among the flowers, and lifted the thin, white locks from the brow of old Hugh, as his weary head lay resting on the back of his easy-chair.