Protesting, yet filled with a strange joy and pride, Randolph took it from the young girl’s hand.  The little color which had deepened on her cheek cleared away as he thanked her gratefully, and with a quiet dignity she arose and moved toward the others.  Randolph did not linger long after this, and presently took his leave of his host and hostess.

It seemed to him that he walked home that night in the whirling clouds of his dispelled dream.  The airy structure he had built up for the last three months had collapsed.  The enchanted canopy under which he had stood with Miss Avondale was folded forever.  The romance he had evolved from his strange fortune had come to an end, not prosaically, as such romances are apt to do, but with a dramatic termination which, however, was equally fatal to his hopes.  At any other time he might have projected the wildest hopes from the fancy that he and Miss Avondale were orphaned of a common benefactor; but it was plain that her interests were apart from his.  And there was an indefinable something he did not understand, and did not want to understand, in the story she had told him.  How much of it she had withheld, not so much from delicacy or contempt for his understanding as a desire to mislead him, he did not know.  His faith in her had gone with his romance.  It was not strange that the young English girl’s unsophisticated frankness and simple confidences lingered longest in his memory, and that when, a few days later, Mr. Dingwall informed him that Miss Avondale had sailed for England with the Dornton family, he was more conscious of a loss in the stranger girl’s departure.

“I suppose Miss Avondale takes charge of—­of the boy, sir?” he said quietly.

Mr. Dingwall gave him a quick glance.  “Possibly.  Sir William has behaved with great—­er—­consideration,” he replied briefly.

IV

Randolph’s nature was too hopeful and recuperative to allow him to linger idly in the past.  He threw himself into his work at the bank with his old earnestness and a certain simple conscientiousness which, while it often provoked the raillery of his fellow clerks, did not escape the eyes of his employers.  He was advanced step by step, and by the end of the year was put in charge of the correspondence with banks and agencies.  He had saved some money, and had made one or two profitable investments.  He was enabled to take better apartments in the same building he had occupied.  He had few of the temptations of youth.  His fear of poverty and his natural taste kept him from the speculative and material excesses of the period.  A distrust of his romantic weakness kept him from society and meaner entanglements which might have beset his good looks and good nature.  He worked in his rooms at night and forbore his old evening rambles.