Protesting, yet filled with a strange joy and pride, Randolph took it
from the young girl's hand. The little color which had deepened on
her cheek cleared away as he thanked her gratefully, and with a quiet
dignity she arose and moved toward the others. Randolph did not linger
long after this, and presently took his leave of his host and hostess.
It seemed to him that he walked home that night in the whirling clouds
of his dispelled dream. The airy structure he had built up for the last
three months had collapsed. The enchanted canopy under which he had
stood with Miss Avondale was folded forever. The romance he had evolved
from his strange fortune had come to an end, not prosaically, as such
romances are apt to do, but with a dramatic termination which, however,
was equally fatal to his hopes. At any other time he might have
projected the wildest hopes from the fancy that he and Miss Avondale
were orphaned of a common benefactor; but it was plain that her
interests were apart from his. And there was an indefinable something he
did not understand, and did not want to understand, in the story she had
told him. How much of it she had withheld, not so much from delicacy or
contempt for his understanding as a desire to mislead him, he did not
know. His faith in her had gone with his romance. It was not strange
that the young English girl's unsophisticated frankness and simple
confidences lingered longest in his memory, and that when, a few days
later, Mr. Dingwall informed him that Miss Avondale had sailed for
England with the Dornton family, he was more conscious of a loss in the
stranger girl's departure.
"I suppose Miss Avondale takes charge of--of the boy, sir?" he said
quietly.
Mr. Dingwall gave him a quick glance. "Possibly. Sir William has behaved
with great--er--consideration," he replied briefly.
IV
Randolph's nature was too hopeful and recuperative to allow him to
linger idly in the past. He threw himself into his work at the bank with
his old earnestness and a certain simple conscientiousness which, while
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