Now Florence was quite alone.  She had grown to be seventeen; timid and retiring as her solitary life had made her, it had not embittered her.  A child in innocent simplicity:  a woman in her modest self-reliance and her deep intensity of feeling, both child and woman seemed at once expressed in her fair face and fragile delicacy of shape; in her thrilling voice, her calm eyes, and sometimes in a strange ethereal light that seemed to rest upon her head.

Mrs. Dombey she seldom saw, and the day soon came when she lost her entirely.  The wife’s supreme indifference to himself and his wishes, stung Mr. Dombey more than any other kind of treatment could have done, and he determined to bend her to his will.  She was the first person who had ever ventured to oppose him in the slightest particular;—­their pride, however different in kind, was equal in degree, and their flinty opposition struck out fire which consumed the tie between them—­and soon the final separation came.

One evening after a dispute with her husband, Mrs. Dombey went out to dinner, and did not return.  In the confusion of that dreadful night, compassion for her father was the first distinct emotion that overwhelmed Florence.  At daybreak she hastened to him with her arms stretched out, crying, “Oh, dear, dear papa!” as if she would have clasped him around the neck.  But in his frenzy he answered her with brutal words, and lifted up his cruel arm and struck her, with that heaviness, that she tottered on the marble floor.  She did not sink down at his feet; she did not shut out the sight of him with her trembling hands; she did not utter one word of reproach.  But she looked at him, and a cry of desolation issued from her heart.  She saw she had no father upon earth, and ran out, orphaned, from his house.  Another moment and Florence, with her head bent down to hide her agony of tears, was in the street.

In the wildness of her sorrow, shame, and terror, the forlorn girl hurried through the sunshine of a bright morning as if it were the darkness of a winter night.  Wringing her hands and weeping bitterly, she fled without a thought, without a hope, without a purpose, but to fly somewhere—­anywhere.  Suddenly she thought of the only other time she had been lost in the wide wilderness of London—­and went that way.  To the home of Walter’s uncle.

Checking her sobs and endeavoring to calm the agitation of her manner, so as to avoid attracting notice, Florence was going more quietly when Diogenes, panting for breath, and making the street ring with his glad bark, was at her feet.

She bent down on the pavement, and laid his rough loving foolish head against her breast, and they went on together.

At length the little shop came into view.  She ran in and found Captain Cuttle, in his glazed hat, standing over the fire, making his morning’s cocoa.  Hearing a footstep and the rustle of a dress, the captain turned at the instant when Florence reeled and fell upon the floor.