e, though we are stranger to each other
than we have been, that I am unchanged to you within. Forgive me
for having ever darkened your dark home--I am a shadow on it, I know
well--and let us never speak of this again.'

'Mama,' sobbed Florence, 'we are not to part?'

'We do this that we may not part,' said Edith. 'Ask no more. Go,
Florence! My love and my remorse go with you!'

She embraced her, and dismissed her; and as Florence passed out of her
room, Edith looked on the retiring figure, as if her good angel went out
in that form, and left her to the haughty and indignant passions that
now claimed her for their own, and set their seal upon her brow.

From that hour, Florence and she were, as they had been, no more. For
days together, they would seldom meet, except at table, and when Mr
Dombey was present. Then Edith, imperious, inflexible, and silent, never
looked at her. Whenever Mr Carker was of the party, as he often was,
during the progress of Mr Dombey's recovery, and afterwards, Edith held
herself more removed from her, and was more distant towards her, than at
other times. Yet she and Florence never encountered, when there was no
one by, but she would embrace her as affectionately as of old, though
not with the same relenting of her proud aspect; and often, when she had
been out late, she would steal up to Florence's room, as she had been
used to do, in the dark, and whisper 'Good-night,' on her pillow. When
unconscious, in her slumber, of such visits, Florence would sometimes
awake, as from a dream of those words, softly spoken, and would seem
to feel the touch of lips upon her face. But less and less often as the
months went on.

And now the void in Florence's own heart began again, indeed, to make
a solitude around her. As the image of the father whom she loved had
insensibly become a mere abstraction, so Edith, following the fate of
all the rest about whom her affections had entwined themselves, was
fleeting, fading, growing paler in the distance, every day. Little by
little, she receded from Florence, like the retiring ghost of what she
had been; little by little, the chasm between them widened and seemed
deeper; little by little, all the power of earnestness and tenderness
she had shown, was frozen up in the bold, angry hardihood with which she
stood, upon the brink of a deep precipice unseen by Florence, daring to
look down.

There was but one consideration to set against the heavy loss of Edith,