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No, Lucy Your life is all to come.
You have known sorrow and trouble, but you have not drained the cup of happiness only to find the bitterness of the draught. That is real despair. You have not outlived your hopes, and your dreams and your faith — nay, indeed, your very self — as I have.”
[Pg 46]
CHAPTER IV.
THE MORLAND COUGH.
LAURENCE DESMOND heard the sublimely solemn service read above his old tutor’s coffin, and left Ventnor without seeing Lucy Alford. Again and again, he told himself that with the orphan girl’s future fate, he had no concern. He had given her a good friend — and a friend of her own sex — who would doubtless afford her help and protection, directly or indirectly, in the future.
“She has passed out of my life,” he said to himself, “poor little thing! Let me forget that I ever saw her.”
When Mr. Desmond paid his next visit to River Lawn he found Lucy comfortably installed there, and looking pale as the snowdrops in her[Pg 47] simple mourning. She said a few tremulous words in answer to his gentle greeting and then left the room.
“She does not like to talk of her father,” Mrs. Jerningham said when she was gone, “and I dare say she has run away to escape your possible condolences. He seems on the whole to have been rather a worthless person, but she…
