know I should never hear his
footstep again,--to see the door open again and again, and know he would
never, never pass through. It would break my heart,--it would break my
heart!"

"It is broken now!" cried Aimee, in a burst of grief, and she could
protest no more.

But she remained as long as she well could, petting and talking to her.
She knew better than to offer her threadbare commonplace comfort, so
she took refuge in talking of life at Bloomsbury Place,--about Tod and
Mollie and Toinette, and the new picture Phil was at work upon. But it
was a hard matter for her to control herself sufficiently to conceal
that she was almost in an agony of anxiousness and foreboding. What was
she to do with this sadly altered Dolly, the mainspring of whose bright,
spirited life was gone? How was she to help her if she could not restore
Grif,--it was only Grif she wanted,--and where was he? It was just
as she had always said it would be,--without Grif, Dolly was Dolly
no longer,--for Grif's sake her faithful, passionate girl's heart was
breaking slowly.

Lady Augusta, encountering her ex-governess in the drawing-room that
evening, raised her eyeglass to that noble feature, her nose, and
condescended a questioning inspection, full of disapproval of the heavy,
well-falling black silk and the Elizabethan frill.

"You are looking shockingly pale and thin," she said.

Dolly glanced at her reflection in an adjacent mirror. She only smiled
faintly, in silence.

"I was not aware that you were ill," proceeded her ladyship.

"I cannot say that I am ill," Dolly answered. "How is Phemie?"

"Euphemia," announced Lady Augusta, "is well, and I _trust_" as if she
rather doubted her having so far overcome old influences of an evil
nature,--"I _trust_ improving, though I regret to hear from her
preceptress that she is singularly deficient in application to her
musical lessons."

Dolly thought of the professor with the lumpy face, and smiled again.
Phemie's despairing letters to herself sufficiently explained why her
progress was so slow.

"I hope," said her ladyship to Miss MacDowlas, afterward, "that you
are satisfied with Dorothea's manner of filling her position in your
household."

"I never was so thoroughly satisfied in my life," returned the old lady,
stiffly. "She is a very quickwitted, pleasantly natured girl, and I am
extremely fond of her."

"Ah," waving a majestic and unbending fan of carved ivory. "She has
possibly impr