Alas! this love had ranked above everything else in her tender heart.
"The world is naught when one is gone
Who was the world? then the heart breaks
That this is lost which was once won."
The mother's heart was cruelly wounded by the desertion of her daughter.
"I will never forgive her!" she cried in the first agony of the shock. "She has proved herself the child of her wicked father by this heartless desertion of home and friends, and I can realize how little of my blood runs in the veins of the daughter I bore him."
In vain did Cissy intercede for her friend.
"Remember how young and loving she was, dear Mrs. Fitzgerald. Then, too, her lover was very charming—just the sort of a man to fascinate a young girl."
"He may have been as handsome as Apollo, and as fascinating, but he was not a good man, or he would never have persuaded a young girl to elope with him. Why did he not come frankly to me like a gentleman, and ask for my daughter's hand?"
"Dear Mrs. Fitzgerald, because he knew it would be hopeless. Of course our dear Geraldine must have acquainted him with your opposition to the marriage," said Cissy, gently, though in her heart she thought very strangely of Geraldine, asking herself over and over why the girl had chosen to deceive her so in asserting that she knew nothing of Hawthorne's whereabouts.
"She must have been in secret correspondence with him all the while, but I could not have believed it of Geraldine but for that note in her own writing," she said, sadly enough to the angry mother.
At first, Mrs. Fitzgerald had feared that Cissy was in the plot of Geraldine's elopement, but the young girl's surprise and grief were so genuine that she dismissed the doubt. "She has treated you shamefully, too, my dear," said the lady. "After inviting you here as a guest, and promising you such a charming time, it was abominable to go off that way and leave you in the lurch."