and though it was slight comfort to her burdened heart, she tried to
think it some relief. No longer divided between her affection and duty
to the two, Florence could love both and do no injustice to either. As
shadows of her fond imagination, she could give them equal place in her
own bosom, and wrong them with no doubts.

So she tried to do. At times, and often too, wondering speculations on
the cause of this change in Edith, would obtrude themselves upon her
mind and frighten her; but in the calm of its abandonment once more to
silent grief and loneliness, it was not a curious mind. Florence had
only to remember that her star of promise was clouded in the general
gloom that hung upon the house, and to weep and be resigned.

Thus living, in a dream wherein the overflowing love of her young
heart expended itself on airy forms, and in a real world where she had
experienced little but the rolling back of that strong tide upon itself,
Florence grew to be seventeen. Timid and retiring as her solitary life
had made her, it had not embittered her sweet temper, or her
earnest nature. A child in innocent simplicity; a woman m her modest
self-reliance, and her deep intensity of feeling; both child and woman
seemed at once expressed in her face and fragile delicacy of shape, and
gracefully to mingle there;--as if the spring should be unwilling to
depart when summer came, and sought to blend the earlier beauties of the
flowers with their bloom. But in her thrilling voice, in her calm eyes,
sometimes in a sage ethereal light that seemed to rest upon her head,
and always in a certain pensive air upon her beauty, there was an
expression, such as had been seen in the dead boy; and the council in
the Servants' Hall whispered so among themselves, and shook their heads,
and ate and drank the more, in a closer bond of good-fellowship.

This observant body had plenty to say of Mr and Mrs Dombey, and of Mr
Carker, who appeared to be a mediator between them, and who came and
went as if he were trying to make peace, but never could. They all
deplored the uncomfortable state of affairs, and all agreed that Mrs
Pipchin (whose unpopularity was not to be surpassed) had some hand in
it; but, upon the whole, it was agreeable to have so good a subject
for a rallying point, and they made a great deal of it, and enjoyed
themselves very much.

The general visitors who came to the house, and those among whom Mr and
Mrs Dombey visited, thought it a p