sitating--'if it is not too bold
to call you so!

Walter!' she exclaimed, surprised.

'If anything could make me happier in being allowed to see and speak
to you, would it not be the discovery that I had any means on earth of
doing you a moment's service! Where would I not go, what would I not do,
for your sake?'

She smiled, and called him brother.

'You are so changed,' said Walter--

'I changed!' she interrupted.

'To me,' said Walter, softly, as if he were thinking aloud, 'changed to
me. I left you such a child, and find you--oh! something so different--'

'But your sister, Walter. You have not forgotten what we promised to
each other, when we parted?'

'Forgotten!' But he said no more.

'And if you had--if suffering and danger had driven it from your
thoughts--which it has not--you would remember it now, Walter, when you
find me poor and abandoned, with no home but this, and no friends but
the two who hear me speak!'

'I would! Heaven knows I would!' said Walter.

'Oh, Walter,' exclaimed Florence, through her sobs and tears. 'Dear
brother! Show me some way through the world--some humble path that I may
take alone, and labour in, and sometimes think of you as one who will
protect and care for me as for a sister! Oh, help me, Walter, for I need
help so much!'

'Miss Dombey! Florence! I would die to help you. But your friends are
proud and rich. Your father--'

'No, no! Walter!' She shrieked, and put her hands up to her head, in an
attitude of terror that transfixed him where he stood. 'Don't say that
word!'

He never, from that hour, forgot the voice and look with which she
stopped him at the name. He felt that if he were to live a hundred
years, he never could forget it.

Somewhere--anywhere--but never home! All past, all gone, all lost, and
broken up! The whole history of her untold slight and suffering was in
the cry and look; and he felt he never could forget it, and he never
did.

She laid her gentle face upon the Captain's shoulder, and related how
and why she had fled. If every sorrowing tear she shed in doing so, had
been a curse upon the head of him she never named or blamed, it would
have been better for him, Walter thought, with awe, than to be renounced
out of such a strength and might of love.

'There, precious!' said the Captain, when she ceased; and deep attention
the Captain had paid to her while she spoke; listening, with his glazed
hat all awry and his mouth wide open. 'Awast