tress's rooms, but--

'But what! what was it?' Florence heard her father demand like a madman.

'But the inner dressing-room was locked and the key gone.'

Her father seized a candle that was flaming on the ground--someone had
put it down there, and forgotten it--and came running upstairs with such
fury, that Florence, in her fear, had hardly time to fly before him.
She heard him striking in the door, as she ran on, with her hands widely
spread, and her hair streaming, and her face like a distracted person's,
back to her own room.

When the door yielded, and he rushed in, what did he see there? No
one knew. But thrown down in a costly mass upon the ground, was every
ornament she had had, since she had been his wife; every dress she had
worn; and everything she had possessed. This was the room in which he
had seen, in yonder mirror, the proud face discard him. This was the
room in which he had wondered, idly, how these things would look when he
should see them next!

Heaping them back into the drawers, and locking them up in a rage of
haste, he saw some papers on the table. The deed of settlement he had
executed on their marriage, and a letter. He read that she was gone.
He read that he was dishonoured. He read that she had fled, upon
her shameful wedding-day, with the man whom he had chosen for her
humiliation; and he tore out of the room, and out of the house, with
a frantic idea of finding her yet, at the place to which she had been
taken, and beating all trace of beauty out of the triumphant face with
his bare hand.

Florence, not knowing what she did, put on a shawl and bonnet, in a
dream of running through the streets until she found Edith, and then
clasping her in her arms, to save and bring her back. But when she
hurried out upon the staircase, and saw the frightened servants going up
and down with lights, and whispering together, and falling away from her
father as he passed down, she awoke to a sense of her own powerlessness;
and hiding in one of the great rooms that had been made gorgeous for
this, felt as if her heart would burst with grief.

Compassion for her father was the first distinct emotion that made head
against the flood of sorrow which overwhelmed her. Her constant nature
turned to him in his distress, as fervently and faithfully, as if,
in his prosperity, he had been the embodiment of that idea which had
gradually become so faint and dim. Although she did not know, otherwise
than through t