The great shock through which she had passed had loosened all the ties in life, and made the friends of a few weeks ago seem but the merest of acquaintances. Bridgie had written the sweetest of sympathetic letters, but sorry though she might be, the force of circumstances kept the two girls so far apart, that what had been the saddest time in her friend's life had seen the climax of her own gaiety. She had been dancing, and singing, and pleasure making while Sylvia shed the bitter tears of bereavement, and in a few weeks more she would be spirited off in Esmeralda's train to another scene of gaiety. The O'Shaughnessys were by nature so light of heart that they might not care to welcome among them a black-robed figure of grief! Sylvia felt as though the whole wide world yawned between her and the old interests, and did not yet realise that this feeling of aloofness from the world and its interests is one of the invariable accompaniments of grief. She was young and not given to serious reflection, and she knew only that she was tired and miserable, that the white cliffs about which she had been accustomed to speak with patriotic fervour, looked bleak and cheerless in the light of a wet and chilly evening. June though it was, she was glad to wrap herself in her cloak, and pull her umbrella over her head as she passed down the gangway on to the stage. In Paris it had been a glorious summer day, and the change to wet and gloom seemed typical of the home-coming before her. The cloaked and mackintoshed figures on the stage seemed all black, all the same. She would not look at them lest their presence should make her realise more keenly her own loneliness; but someone came up beside her as she struggled through the crowd, and forcibly lifted the bag from her hand. She turned in alarm and saw a man's tall figure, lifted her eyes, and felt her troubles and anxieties drop from her like a cloak. It was Jack O'Shaughnessy himself! CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE. A COMFORTER. Think of it! Think of it! The grey, inhospitable skies, the rain-swept stage, the feeling of hopeless loneliness, as one traveller after another was greeted with loving exclamations, and borne away by friendly watchers; and then suddenly to feel your hand grasped, and laid tenderly on a protecting arm, and to see, looking into your own, the face of all others which you would have wished for, had the choice been given! To feel no longer a helpless unit, belonging to no one, and having no corner of the earth to call your own, but to know that someone had watched for your arrival, and to read how you had been missed, in the flash of eloquent eyes. "Oh, Jack!" cried Sylvia involuntarily; "oh, Jack!" and clung to his arm with a sob of pure joy and thanksgiving. "Oh, I'm so glad! I was so lonely. How did you--whatever made you come?"