After regarding the matter with extreme deliberation, Mr. Lobyer arrived at the conclusion that he might as well gratify his own inclination and marry the painter's daughter, whose bewitchingly disdainful airs gave a zest to his courtship. So when Florence went back to the Fountains, she returned as the affianced wife of Thomas Lobyer; and she carried in one of her portmanteaus a casket of jewels which winked and twinkled in the cold winter sunshine when she lifted the lid to peep at her treasures. She had left the East Cliff radiant with feminine vanity, bright with the golden halo of success; for her friends knew that before the year was out she would be mistress of Pevenshall Place and a West-end mansion; and she knew that they envied her good fortune. Mr. Lobyer's society was not eminently delightful; but Mr. Lobyer's mail-phaeton and thoroughbred steppers were absolute perfection. Mr. Lobyer's conversational powers were very limited; but the establishments of Brighton jewellers are more fascinating than any other jewel-shops in England, and are scarcely to be surpassed by the glories of the Rue de la Paix. And Mr. Lobyer had been a liberal customer in Castle Square. William Crawford had heard of his daughter's conquest, and had been congratulated upon the brilliancy of her prospects; but he had not taken upon himself to interfere with her arrangements. The manners and ideas of modern young ladies were something past the pure-minded artist's powers of comprehension. He remembered his wife with her primitive notions and womanly tenderness, so fond, so clinging, so loving, so girlishly sentimental, so quick to be pleased with any simple pleasure, so ready to be frightened by a harsh word, or moved to tears by a tender thought; and remembering her, he was utterly bewildered by the daughter, who was so like and yet so unlike that lost darling. Whether the sentiments which Florence openly professed were the expression of her real feelings or only the fashionable cant of her sex, Mr. Crawford was at a loss to imagine; but the tone of her conversation gave him unspeakable pain. This daughter, who spoke of him as "a dear old party," and who pronounced his best picture to be "awfully jolly," was so unlike the daughter he had dreamed of welcoming to the home of his prosperity. He knew that she was charming; that slang from her lips took a new accent, and assumed a pretty quaintness in place of its native vulgarity. He had seen that her heart needed only to be awakened by some piteous appeal, some sorrowful spectacle, to reveal itself rich in all womanly tenderness and compassion. But she was not the daughter of his dreams. "I am punished for my cowardice," he thought. "I was afraid to face the struggles of poverty with my child in my arms. I gave her into the hands of strangers, and I am fool enough to wonder now that she is strange to me."