A shrill noise quivered through the trees.

While she sat weeping, it grew late, and dreary midnight tolled out from the steeples.
Florence was little more than a child in years--not yet fourteen-and the loneliness and gloom of such an hour in the great house where Death had lately made its own tremendous devastation, might have set an older fancy brooding on vague terrors.

But her innocent imagination was too full of one theme to admit them.

Nothing wandered in her thoughts but love--a wandering love, indeed, and castaway--but turning always to her father.

There was nothing in the dropping of the rain, the moaning of the wind, the shuddering of the trees, the striking of the solemn clocks, that shook this one thought, or diminished its interest' Her recollections of the dear dead boy--and they were never absent--were itself, the same thing.