His truant fancy wanders.”
The purple gloaming deepened, the shadows grew darker in the gloomy room, until even the eyes of love could not distinguish the written words; so Floy laid her letters upon the little table before her, and fell to dreaming over them in tender wise:
“Seven letters! and such beautiful long ones, too! Oh, how good he was to write me such charming love letters! Can such love ever grow cold, I wonder? Can he ever look back and regret? Ah, no, no, no! I will not remember the stories of false love I have read and heard. He, my own dark-eyed lover, is not one of those fickle wretches flying from one love to another, like a butterfly from flower to flower. He will be true.”
A happy sigh escaped her lips, and she continued:
“It is terrible being shut up here like a prisoner, with nothing to eat but half-ripe fruit picked from the orchard by night! I wish I dared reveal myself to Auntie Banks and beg her to come here and share my solitude. But she wouldn’t consent, I know; and those wretches would contrive some new peril for me, if they found out I was alive. Oh, dear Heaven, give me patience to bear this life till my lover returns! It is only a few days more now, for he said he should not stay longer than a month. He will think it strange I did not answer his letters, as he told me to do in each loving postscript; but I can easily explain all to him when I see him, and he will not blame me for not writing when he knows I did not get his letters for so long.”
Poor Floy, counting the days and hours before her lover’s return, how little she dreamed that far across the sea he lay ill unto death, stricken down by the false and cruel story that she was dead.
The hours waned, and the moon rose in the purple sky, while she lingered there, poor child, so lonely in her exile, so beautiful, so unfortunate.
She rose presently, drew the shutters close, then lighted a little lamp on the table, not caring much if the light was seen by passers-by, for she knew no one would venture in. She had heard stories often of lights being seen in the house by night, but they were all attributed to ghostly visitants.
Floy knew the ghastly secret of Suicide Place now, and nothing but her terror of Otho Maury would have tempted her to enter the house again.
But when she had recovered consciousness at Bellevue Hospital the evening of her accident, and found herself uninjured, an awful fear of Otho Maury’s persecutions entered her mind.