It was not a long illness, Louie’s, though it had been severe enough to destroy for her consciousness both of pain and pleasure.  Her aunt had left other work and had nursed her through it; but when, strong and well once more, she went about her old duties, it seemed to her that that consciousness had never returned:  she took up life with utter listlessness and indifference, and she fancied that her love for Andrew was as dead as all the rest.  The poor little thing, laying this flattering unction to heart, did not call much reason to her aid, or she would have known that there was some meaning in it when she cried all day on coming across an old daguerreotype of Andrew.  “It isn’t for love of him,” she sobbed.  “It’s for the loss of all that love out of my life that was heaven to me.  Oh no, no!  I love him no longer:  I can’t, I can’t love him:  he is all the same as another woman’s husband.”  But, despite this stout assertion, she could not bring herself to part with that picture:  he was not in reality quite the husband of another woman, and till he was indeed she meant to keep it.  “He is only promised to her yet, and he was promised first to me,” she said for salve to conscience; and meanwhile the picture grew so blurred with conscious tears, and perhaps with unconscious kisses, that it might have been his or another’s:  Miss Frarnie herself, had she seen it, could not have told whose it was.

Notwithstanding all the elasticity of youth, life became an inexpressibly dull thing to Louie as the year wore into the next—­dull, with neither aim nor object, the past a pain to remember, the future a blank to consider.  She could live only from day to day, one day like another, till they grew so wearisome she wondered her hair was not gray—­the pretty hair that, shorn from her head in her illness, had grown again in a short fleece of silky curls—­for it seemed to her that she had lived a hundred years.  And because troubles never come alone, and one perhaps makes the other seem lighter and better to be borne, in the thick of a long winter’s storm they brought home her father, the old fisherman, drowned and dead.

Captain Traverse knew of the old fisherman’s death through the newspapers that found him in his foreign ports—­not through Miss Frarnie’s letters, for she knew almost nothing of the existence or non-existence of such low people; and therefore, conjecture as he needs must concerning Louie’s means of livelihood now, there was no intelligence to relieve any anxiety he might have felt, or to inform him of the sale of the cottage to pay the debt of the mortgage under which it was bought, or of the support that Louie earned in helping her aunt watch with the sick and lay out the dead:  he could only be pricked with knowledge of the fact that he had no right to his anxiety, or to the mention of her name even in his prayers—­if he said them.