Mr. Desmond departed to get his hat bound with the insignia of grief. Mrs. Jerningham went back to the parlour, where the orphan sat with listless hands loosely locked, and vacant, tearless eyes, lost in a stupor of grief. But even in this stupor she had recognized the voice of her dead father’s only friend. “Was not that Mr. Desmond in the passage just now?” she asked. “Yes; he has come down to attend his old friend’s funeral.” “How good of him! How kind you both are to me!” murmured Lucy. “Oh, believe me, I am grateful. And yet, dear Mrs. Jerningham, I feel as if it would be better for me to be going to lie by _his_ side in that peaceful grave.” “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.” 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 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 mourns him as if he had been a saint. ‘We were so happy together,’ she says; and then she tells me of his interest in her career, and the patience with which he would sit in the boxes night after night to see her act, and then would tell her the points in which she failed, and the points in which she succeeded, and lament the impossibility of her wearing a mask, with some dreadful pipe or mouthpiece, like the Greek actors; and she tells me of their cosy little suppers after the theatre, pettitoes--WHAT are pettitoes?--and baked potatoes, and sausages, and other dreadful things which it would be certain death for persons in society to eat; and so the poor child runs on. She is the most affectionate, grateful creature I ever met, and I think she is beginning to love me.” “She has reason to do so,” replied Mr. Desmond. “I suppose she will be obliged to go on the stage again. I have a promise of an engagement for her from my friend Hartstone.”