Aurora Floyd

oods, for it found Archibald Floyd watchi

ry little. This fever was as other fevers to them. The young lady had caught a cold, perhaps; she had been imprudent, as these young people will be, and had received some sudden chill. She had very likely overheated herself with dancing, or had sat in a draught, or eaten an ice. There was no immediate danger to be apprehended. The patient had a superb constitution; there was wonderful vitality in the system; and, with careful treatment she would soon come round. Careful treatment meant a two-guinea visit every day from each of these learned gentlemen, though, perhaps, had they given utterance to their inmost thoughts, they would have owned that, for all they could tell to the contrary, Aurora Floyd wanted nothing but to be let alone, and left in a darkened chamber to fight out the battle by herself. But the banker would have had all Saville Row summoned to the sick-bed of his child, if

d been utterly forgotten. She seldom recognized Lucy or Mrs. Alexander, mistaking them for all kinds of unlikely people; but she never entirely forgot her father, and, indeed, always seemed to b

he hushed mansion in which Aurora lay, with loving friends about her. He held the footman who answered the door by the button-hole, and would have gladly paid the man half a crown a minute for his time while he asked anxious questions about Miss Floyd's health. Mr. Mellish was warmly sympathized with, therefore, in the servants' hall at Felden. His man had informed the banker's household how he was the best master in England, and how Mellish Park was a species of terrestrial paradise, mainta

scarcely heeded his intended son-in-law's disappearance in his anxiety about Aurora. When he did open the letter, Captain Bulstrode's words were al

this communication was

morning. I have laid it aside, to be replied to, D.V., at a future time. At present I am una

rchibald Floyd's devotion to his daughter, he thought that this serious illness was doubtless some very trifling business - some feminine nervous attack, common to young ladies upon any hitch in thei

d with Aurora. What if, after all, this secret involved only some school-girl's folly? No; the crouching figure and ghastly face gave the lie to that hope. The secret, whatever it might be, was a matter of life and death to Aurora Floyd. He dared not try to guess what it was. He tried to close his mind against the surmises that would arise to him. In the first days that succeeded that terrible Christmas he determined to leave

ar and trembling; but his father asked what the deuce was the matter with the boy, that he looked so chapfallen, and why he didn't take his gun and

did Lady Bulstrode al

or an explanation, I su

, mo

he res

had rather you would not speak to me of

lstrode reared its weather-beaten walls. The wail of mourning voices might be loud in Kent, and not a whisper of death reach the listening ears in Cornwall. How he envied the lowest servant at Felden, who knew day by day and hour by hour of the progress of the battle between Death and Aurora Floyd! And yet, after all, what was she to him? What did it matter to him if she were well or ill? The grave could never separate them more utterly than they had been separated from the very moment in which he discovered that she was not worthy to be his wife. He had done her no wrong; he had given her a full and fair opportunity of clearing herself from the doubtful shadow on her name,

l in flinging off a worn-out garment. Our poor, threadbare selves, the shadows of what we were! With what sublime, patronizing pity, with what scornful compassion, we look back upon the helpless dead and gone creatures, and wonder that anything so foolish could have been allowed to cumber the earth! Shall I feel the same contempt ten years hence for myself as I am to-day as I feel to-day for myself as I was ten years ago? Will the loves and aspirations, the beliefs and desires of to-day, appear as pitiful the

talogue of the British Museum if I were to tell all that Talbot Bulstrode felt and suffered in the month of January, 1858 - if I were to anatomize the doubts, and confessions, and self-contradictions, the mental resolutions, made one moment to be broken the next. I refrain, therefore, and will set down nothing but the fact that, on a certain Sunday, midway in the month, the captain, sitting in the family pew at Bulstrode church, directly

the oaks and beeches; all nature was rejoicing in the mild April weather when Aurora Floyd lifted her dark eyes to her father's face with something of their old look and familiar light. The battle had been a long and severe one, but it was wellnigh over

rvice to menial hands: Mrs. Powell, like some pale and quiet shadow, lurked amid the bed-curtains, soft of foot and watchful of eye, invaluable in the sick-chamber, as the doctors said. Throughout her illness, Aurora had never mentioned the name of Talbot Bulstrode. Not even when the fever was at its worst, and the brain most distraught, had that familiar name escaped her lips. Other names, strange to Lucy, had been repeated by her again and again: the names of places and horses, and slangy technicalities of the turf, had in

den, and Leamington was suggested by the doctors as the best place for the change - a mild climate and a pretty inland retre

ice; but as that lady considered it a part of her duty to read aloud for the invalid's delectation, Miss Floyd was too good-natured to own how tired she was of Marmion and Childe Harold, Evangeline and The Queen of the May, and how she would have preferred, in her present state of mind, to listen to a lively dispute between a brood of ducks round the pond in the farm-yard, or a trifling discussion in the pig-sty, to the sublimest lines ever penned by poet, living or dead. The poor girl had suffered very much, and there was a certain sensuous, lazy pleasure in this slow recovery, this gradual return to strength. Her own nature revived in unison with the bright revival of the genial summer weather. As the trees in the garden put forth new strength and beauty, so the glorious vitality of her constitution returned with much of its wonted power. The bitter blows had left their scars behind them, but they had not killed her after all. They had not utterly changed her even, for glimpses of the old Aurora appeared day by day in the pale convalescent; and Archibald Floyd, whose life was at best but a reflected existence, felt his hopes revive as he looked at his daughter. Lucy and her mother had gone back to the villa at Fulham, and to their own family duties; so the Leamington party consisted only of Aurora and her father, and that pale shadow of propriety, the ensign's ligh

when her father asked her why she had dismissed Talbot Bulstrode, she made no answer to that question, but simply told him that the quarrel had been a very painful one, and that she hoped never to hear the captain's name again, although at the same time she assured Mr. Floyd that her lover's conduct had been in nowise unbecoming a gentleman and a man of honor. Archibald implicitly obeyed his daughter in this matter, and, the name of Talbot Bulstrode never being spoken, it seemed as if the young man had dropped out of their lives, or as if he had never had any part in the destiny of Aurora Floyd. Heaven knows what Aurora herself felt and suffered in the quiet of her low-roofed, white-curtained little chamber, with the soft May moonlight stealing in at the casement windows, and creeping in wan radiance about the walls. Heaven only knows the bitterness of the silent battle. Her vitality made her strong to suffer; her vivid imagination intensified every throb of pain. In a dull and torpid soul grief is a slow anguish; but with her it was a fierce and tempestuous emotion, in which past and future seemed rolled together with the present to make a concentrated agony. But, by an all-wise dispensation, the stormy sorrow wears itself out by reason of its very violence, while the dull woe drags its slow length sometimes through weary years, becoming at last ingrafted in the very nature of the patient sufferer, as some diseases become part of our constitutions. Aurora was fortunate in being permitted to fight her battle in silence, and to suffer unquestioned. If the dark hollow rings about her eyes told of sleepless nights, Archibald Floyd forbore to

ora had fallen asleep with an open book in her hand, and the banker walke

, I could have wished him to be just such a frank, noble-hearted fellow as yourself. I'm an old man, and have seen a great deal of trouble - the sort of trouble which strikes deeper home to the heart than any sorrows tha

any one else wishes to get rid of me? Do

ciety, and seems to treat you almost as if you were her brother; but - but - I know your feelings,

ain. Miss Floyd has rejected me once already; but perhaps I was in too great a hurry. I've grown wiser since then, and I've learned to bide my time. I've one of the finest estates in Yorkshire; I'm not worse looking than the generality of fellows, or worse educated than the generality of fellows. I may n't have straight hair, and a pale face, an

may,

or calling me John - have I yo

llish by the hand as he

John, my best and

th of half England, yet united by an impalpable chain, were struggling day by day to break its links; while poor John Mellish quietly waited in the backgroun