The old man felt a tugging at his heart-strings. He turned his eyes up to encounter those of his wife’s, looking down upon him from her portrait with a soft, sad expression, as though to remind him of her dying injunctions to cherish and make happy the little helpless innocent creatures she left behind her. He tottered rather than walked to the side of his daughter. He placed his hand upon her shoulder. “My sweet child, my own Flo’, there should be no division between us,” he said, in a voice quivering with emotion. Flora flung herself upon his breast with a cry of joy, as the old tone of voice greeted her ears, and he bent over her, kissing her white forehead with his trembling lips. Outwardly there was a reunion, and inwardly too, at least, so far as their true attachment for each other, uninfluenced by the particular cause of their recent estrangement, existed. Flora had astonished her father; no wonder--she had surprised herself. The alteration in his manner since his return to Harleydale had been so remarkable that, while it pained her, it was incomprehensible to her. There was something so new in his _hauteur_ and so bewildering in his grand patronising air, that she, whose memory of former grandeur was but a fleeting dream, and of their recent humble condition exceedingly vivid, felt distressed at the splendour by which she was surrounded so abruptly, and by homage which she was called upon to render as well as to receive. She wished to have been permitted to glide into her new position, and not at one bound spring from a child of poverty into the position of a duchess. She forgot that penury had been, as it were, her normal condition, that the change in her father was a resumption of his dignity, not a new manner founded upon a sudden accession of wealth. She had been uncomfortable in her isolation at Harleydale, for isolated she was. She had brooded over the changes which had occurred and those which threatened her. She had held self-communings and imaginary conversations, with what result we have seen. Her inner nature had developed itself in one great explosion; it gave to both father and daughter a lesson. Wilton, as he embraced his daughter, became conscious that her affectionate nature required something more tender in the mode of addressing her, and in the manner of acting towards her, than he had lately adopted. He perceived that gentle fondness would gain always the strongest influence over her, and he resolved on the instant to dispense with his loftiness in his interviews with her, and he hoped, in recovering the earnest affection she had always previously evinced, to steal from her a consent to wed the man he had selected for her husband. She, too, at the moment had a thought that, with returning fondness, her father might be led to see Hal Vivian with, her eyes, and his strong opposition to their union might be made to pass away.