All days and all nights pass, therefore this night passed. The first light of morning came palely in at the windows upon the two women who were still by the hearth. But Leander, when half awake, had been kind enough to yield to his mother's entreaties at about two in the morning, and had allowed her to lead him to his room.

After that hour Mrs. Ffolliott had not slept. She grew more and more alarmed. She fidgeted about from door to window, to the piazza, to the grounds. But Carolyn did not accompany her; she sat by the fire, sometimes shivering as she crouched forward. Every few moments she repeated to herself the lines her mother had brought to her memory:

It was one of the clearest, loveliest mornings of September. "They are drowned; perhaps their bodies will be washed ashore. Oh, my poor Caro!" Thus Mrs. Ffolliott, embracing her daughter when she came in from the piazza. She continued at intervals to say, "They are drowned! They are drowned!"

The servants rose and began gaily the duties of Miss Carolyn's wedding-day, but directly they also were enveloped in the gloom. Prudence's mother had an attack of hysteria as soon as she came into the breakfast-room, and it was Carolyn who led her back to her own chamber. It was Carolyn who organized what search was possible, and who sent out messages to towns along the shore. She did it persistently and nervelessly, her face coldly set, her voice clear and even.

Her mother looked at her in helpless wonder; her aunt repeated again and again that she wished she had as little feeling as Caro, but then too much feeling had always been her curse. Caro must "take after" the Ffolliotts.

On the morning of the third day Carolyn sent word to her mother that she would not be down to breakfast; she thought she must have taken cold, and she did not wish anything sent up. So her mother presently appeared in her daughter's room. "It isn't a cold, it's a fever," the elder woman exclaimed, as she looked in the girl's face.

"Oh, no," said Carolyn; "I'm not so lucky as that; it's only heroines who have brain fevers and die in such circumstances; and I'm not a heroine."

She spoke the truth in part. She only had a lingering, low fever, from which she began to recover when the weather became frosty.

It was when Carolyn was able to walk out upon the piazza that her mother told her that parts of the Vireo had been found and identified unmistakably; they had been washed ashore a few miles down the coast.

"It's no use hoping any longer," she said.

"I don't hope; I haven't hoped from the very first," was the answer.

There was something so strange in the girl's tone that her mother looked at her in a kind of terror.

Carolyn, closely wrapped, was sitting in the sunlight on the veranda.

"I don't know what you mean," said Mrs. Ffolliott, feebly. "I'm sure I had the strongest hope for several days. It seemed to me they must have been saved somehow; and Rodney was such a good swimmer."

"So was Prudence a good swimmer," said Carolyn. "Yes, she was. But I don't see what happened to the boat; they were—"

"Mother," said Carolyn, wearily, "don't go on talking like that."

"No, no," the mother said, soothingly, but in a perplexed voice; "I won't say anything. We have to bear whatever Providence sends upon us."

Carolyn suddenly sat upright in her chair. "Do we?" she asked, fiercely. Then she made an effort to restrain her words. She sank back again upon the seat. "They are not drowned," she said, calmly, as if merely asserting an evident fact.

Mrs. Ffolliott came close to her daughter and gently stroked her forehead.

"There, there," she said, as if speaking to a child; "we won't talk about it." Then she added, as an afterthought, "But I've ordered the mourning."

"The mourning!"

Again Carolyn sat upright. This time she laughed. At that laugh the mother drew back a little.

"I tell you they are not drowned," the girl repeated.

"Then where are they?"

"What does it matter where they are? They are together."

"Carolyn!"

"Yes, together." "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.

The mother hesitated an instant, then she put the paper on the girl's lap and pointed to the list of passengers on the Scythia.

"Mr. and Mrs. Rodney Lawrence," Carolyn read, then she read again. She heard her mother saying: "It's the same steamer and the same date that you were going with him."

Mrs. Ffolliott was not thinking of grammar as she spoke.

Carolyn looked up, a hard light in her eyes.

"Only he married Prudence instead of me," she said. "It was a fine plan, wasn't it? No one could have made a better. Of course people hated to tell us. Oh!"

She dropped the paper and clasped her hands. In a moment the hard look had left her face. Her lips quivered as she said, "He always loved her; he never loved me. No, he never loved me. Do you suppose he'll be happy with her?"

"I'm sure I hope not," was the angry reply, "and I don't see how it's possible, either. The scoundrel! The ungrateful wretch!"

"Oh, mamma!"

"You don't mean to say you're going to defend him, Carolyn Ffolliott!"

"No, no," she said, in a low voice that trembled piteously; "but I can't stop loving him because he doesn't love me. You see, mamma, I've got to love him. Oh, I wish I hadn't! I wish I could thrust him out of my mind!"

"Got to love him!" cried Mrs. Ffolliott. "Carolyn, I'm ashamed of you. I thought you had more spirit. Are you going to whine in this way? Why, I'll—I'll have you shut up! Do you think I'd have gone on like this if your father had served me so?"

The girl did not answer. She was sitting motionless, with her hands lying inertly in her lap.

Mrs. Ffolliott, in the suddenness of this discovery, hardly knew what she did. She grasped her daughter's shoulder and shook it.

"Have some pride!" she exclaimed.

But Carolyn did not resent the words or the touch. She was staring straight in front of her mother, a nerveless droop to her mouth, a touching despair in her whole aspect.

"You are not going to go about wearing the willow, are you? Oh, the scamp! The villain!"

The sharp voice echoed in the place.

Carolyn now tried to rise. She turned indignantly to her mother, her eyes flashing.

"If you call him such names I'll leave the house," she said, firmly.

"Good heavens! She defends him! The vile—"

"Mother!"

"Carolyn!"

The girl asserted herself. She spoke with dignity. "You are speaking of the man who was to be my husband; please remember that. And I love him; remember that also. By accident he met that—that—" her voice sharpened—"he met Prudence. She, of course, tempted him; she would tempt an angel from heaven. And he loved her. It was all a mistake, his thinking he cared for me,—that is, to marry me. Now we've got to bear it. Prudence—but no," coldly, "why should I talk of her?"

"You defend him!" Mrs. Ffolliott cried, with hysterical repetition. "That a child of mine should—"

"Mother!" said the girl again, "we won't talk of this."

"Not talk of this insult!—this—I say he's a scamp, and he shall never come into my house again!"

"He will probably never try. We shall never see him again. And he won't be happy with her. Oh, I want him to be happy, whatever happens!"

Carolyn said the last words as if she did not know she was not alone. Her face at that moment had a look of such fervid loveliness that her mother involuntarily turned away as if from something sacred.