At Langdale, several people missed Florence and Brenda Heathcote. Susie and her father missed them most, because they were the sort of people who would love the girls for themselves, and not for the money they had been supposed to possess. But there were others who missed them in different degrees and according to their different characters. Bridget, for instance, was extremely sulky when she found that Mrs Fortescue had let Miss Florence go without even one word of farewell, nor one allusion to the sorrow she ought to feel at giving her up. Mrs Fortescue herself had her qualms of conscience. The advertisements she had put into the papers were not receiving satisfactory replies. The ladies, old or young, who suggested residing with Mrs Fortescue offered comparatively small sums for the privilege of dwelling under her roof. Mrs Fortescue felt almost snappish. She did not think that she would make much solid gold out of the young ladies whom she was hoping to have to reside with her. She began to murmur at the dispensations of Providence, and to think it cruelly hard on Brenda and Florence that they should be deprived of their fortunes. She began for the first time to see matters from the girls' point of view. It would, in short, be difficult, almost impossible, for her to find any other pair of girls so nice as these, and so well able to pay her for the great trouble she had taken on their account. She even did not like to think of that morning when she had insisted on depriving Florence of her poached eggs, and giving her a breakfast which under ordinary circumstances would have been partaken of by Bridget. She was also much annoyed at Bridget's determination to leave her; for Bridget was a cheap, as well as a valuable servant; and Mrs Fortescue knew well that such people were rare. She therefore, when she went into the street, had on an injured and melancholy air, and spoke with sadness about the poor _dear_ Heathcotes, wondering what the sweet girls would now do with themselves, and how the cold world would receive these dear orphans, who were so unfitted to plunge into its stormy waves. One of the people she met, as she walked down the street a couple of days after Florence had left Langdale, was Major Reid. Major Reid felt about as cross as man could feel. He had been worked up to a state of intense excitement during his last memorable interview with Mrs Fortescue. He had hoped great things not only for his son, but for himself, after he had heard what in all probability Florence's fortune would be. He had returned home in a genial mood, and in consequence he and the Lieutenant had engaged that evening in a very amicable conversation. Michael found his father much more approachable on certain subjects than he had ever found him before, and in a fit of confidence he had acquainted his parent with part of the truth, but not all, with regard to his financial difficulties.