She lay drooping, her hot face pressed upon her hands, pondering the last few weeks, thoughts and images passing through her brain with a rapidity and an occasional incoherence that was the result of her feverish state. How much she had seen and learnt in these flying days!—it often seemed to her as though her old self had been put off along with her old clothes. She was carried back to the early time when she had just patiently adapted herself to Mr. Manisty's indifference and neglect, as she might have adapted herself to any other condition of life at the villa. She had made no efforts. It had seemed to her mere good manners to assume that he did not want the trouble of her acquaintance, and be done with it. To her natural American feeling indeed, as the girl of the party, it was strange and disconcerting that her host should not make much of her. But she had soon reconciled herself. After all, what was he to her or she to him?

Then, of a sudden, a whole swarm of incidents and impressions rushed upon memory. The semi-darkness of her room was broken by images, brilliant or tormenting—Mr. Manisty's mocking look in the Piazza of St. Peter's—his unkindness to his cousin—his sweetness to his friend—the aspect, now petulant, even childish, and now gracious and commanding beyond any other she had ever known, which he had worn at Nemi. His face, upturned beside her, as she and her horse climbed the steep path; the extraordinary significance, fulness, warmth of the nature behind it; the gradual unveiling of the man's personality, most human, faulty, self-willed, yet perpetually interesting and challenging, whether to the love or hate of the bystander:—these feelings or judgments about her host pulsed through the girl's mind with an energy that she was powerless to arrest. They did not make her happy, but they seemed to quicken and intensify all the acts of thinking and living.

At last, however, she succeeded in recapturing herself, in beating back the thoughts which, like troops over-rash on a doubtful field, appeared to be carrying her into the ambushes and strongholds of an enemy. She was impatient and scornful of them. For, crossing all these memories of things, new or exciting, there was a constant sense of something untoward, something infinitely tragic, accompanying them, developing beside them. In this feverish silence it became a nightmare presence filling the room.

What was the truth about Mr. Manisty and his cousin? Lucy searched her own innocent mind and all its new awakening perceptions in vain. The intimacy of the friendship, as she had first seen it; the tone used by Mr. Manisty that afternoon in speaking of Mrs. Burgoyne; the hundred small signs of a deep distress in her, of a new detachment in him—Lucy wandered in darkness as she thought of them, and yet with vague pangs and jarring vibrations of the heart.

Her troubled dream was suddenly broken by a sound. She sprang up trembling. Was it an angry, distant voice? Did it come from the room across the balcony? No!—it was the loud talking of a group of men on the road outside. She shook all over, unable to restrain herself. 'What would Uncle Ben think of me?' she said to herself in despair. For Uncle Ben loved calm and self-control in women, and had often praised her for not being flighty and foolish, as he in his bachelor solitude conceived most other young women to be.

She looked down at her bandaged wrist. The wound still ached and burned from the pressure of that wild grip which she had not been able to ward off from it. Lucy herself had the strength of healthy youth, but she had felt her strength as nothing in Alice Manisty's hands. And the tyranny of those black eyes!—so like her brother's, without the human placable spark—and the horror of those fierce possessing miseries that lived in them!

Perhaps after all Uncle Ben would not have thought her so cowardly! As she sat up in bed, her hands round her knees, a pitiful home-sickness invaded her. A May scent of roses coming from the wall below the open window recalled to her the spring scents at home—not these strong Italian scents, but thin northern perfumes of lilac and lavender, of pine-needles and fresh grass. It seemed to her that she was on the slope behind Uncle Ben's house, with the scattered farms below—and the maple green in the hollow—and the grassy hillsides folded one upon another—and the gleam of a lake among them—and on the furthest verge of the kind familiar scene, the blue and shrouded heads of mountain peaks. She dropped her head on her knees, and could hear the lowing of cattle and the clucking of hens; she saw the meeting-house roof among the trees, and groups scattered through the lanes on the way to the prayer meeting, the older women in their stuff dresses and straw bonnets, the lean, bronzed men.

Benson's knock dispelled the mirage. The maid brought lemonade and milk, brushed Lucy's long hair and made all straight and comfortable.

When her tendance was over she looked at the door and then at Lucy. 'Miss Manisty said, Miss, I was to see you had your key handy. It's there all right—but it is the door that's wrong. Never saw such flimsy things as the doors in all this place.'

And Benson examined the two flaps of the door, filled with that frank contempt for the foreigner's powers and intelligence which makes the English race so beloved of Europe.

'Why, the floor-bolts'll scarcely hold, neither of them; and the lock's that loose, it's a disgrace. But I shouldn't think the people that own this place had spent a shilling on it since I was born. When you go to lay hold on things they're just tumbling to bits.'

'Oh! never mind, Benson,' said Lucy—shrinking. 'I'm sure it'll be all right. Thank you—and good-night.'

She and Benson avoided looking at each other; and the maid was far too highly trained to betray any knowledge she was not asked for. But when she had taken her departure Lucy slipped out of bed, turned the key, and tightened the bolts herself. It was true that their sockets in the brick floor were almost worn away; and the lock-case seemed scarcely to hold upon the rotten wood. The wood-work, indeed, throughout the whole villa was not only old and worm-eaten, but it had been originally of the rudest description, meant for summer uses, and a villeggiatura existence in which privacy was of small account. The Malestrini who had reared the villa above the Campagna in the late seventeenth century had no money to waste on the superfluities of doors that fitted and windows that shut; he had spent all he had, and more, on the sprawling putti and fruit wreaths of the ceilings, and the arabesques of the walls. And now doors, windows, and shutters alike, shrunken and scorched and blistered by the heat of two hundred summers, were dropping into ruin.

The handling of this rotten lock and its rickety accompaniments suddenly brought back a panic fear on Lucy. What if Alice Manisty and the wind, which was already rising, should burst in upon her together? She looked down upon her night-gown and her bare feet. Well, at least she would not be taken quite unawares! She opened her cupboard and brought from it a white wrapper of a thin woollen stuff which she put on. She thrust her feet into her slippers, and so stood a moment listening, her long hair dropping about her. Nothing! She lay down, and drew a shawl over her. 'I won't—won't—sleep,' she said to herself.

And the last sound she was conscious of was the cry of the little downy owl—so near that it seemed to be almost at her window.

* * * * *

'You are unhappy,' said a voice beside her.

Lucy started. The self in her seemed to wrestle its way upward from black and troubled depths of sleep. She opened her eyes. Someone was bending over her. She felt an ineffable horror, but not the smallest astonishment. Her dreams had prophesied; and she saw what she foreknew.

In the wavering light she perceived a stooping form, and again she noticed a whiteness of hands and face set in a black frame.

'Yes!' she said, lifting herself on her elbow. 'Yes!—what do you want?'

'You have been sobbing in your sleep,' said the voice. 'I know why you are unhappy. My brother is beginning to love you—you might love him. But there is some one between you—and there always will be. There is no hope for you—unless I show you the way out.'

'Miss Manisty!—you oughtn't to be here,' said Lucy, raising herself higher in bed and trying to speak with absolute self-command. 'Won't you go back to bed—won't you let me take you?'

And she made a movement. Instantly a hand was put out. It seized her arm first gently, then irresistibly.

'Don't, don't do that,' said the voice. 'It makes me angry—and—that hurts.'

Alice Manisty raised her other hand to her head, with a strange piteous gesture. Lucy was struck with the movement of the hand. It was shut over something that it concealed.

'I don't want to make you angry,' she said, trying to speak gently and keep down the physical tumult of the heart; 'but it is not good for you to be up like this. You are not strong—you ought to have rest.'

The grip upon her arm relaxed.

'I don't rest now'—a miserable sigh came out of the darkness. 'I sleep sometimes—but I don't rest. And it used all to be so happy once—whether I was awake or asleep. I was extraordinarily happy, all the winter, at Venice. One day Octave and I had a quarrel. He said I was mad—he seemed to be sorry for me—he held my arms and I saw him crying. But it was quite a mistake—I wasn't unhappy then. My brother John was always with me, and he told me the most wonderful things—secrets that no one else knows. Octave could never see him—and it was so strange—I saw him so plain. And my mother and father were there too—there was nothing between me and any dead person. I could see them and speak to them whenever I wished. People speak of separation from those who die. But there is none—they are always there. And when you talk to them, you know that you are immortal as they are—only you are not like them. You remember this world still—you know you have to go back to it. One night John took me—we seemed to go through the clouds—through little waves of white fire—and I saw a city of light, full of spirits—the most beautiful people, men and women—with their souls showing like flames through their frail bodies. They were quite kind—they smiled and talked to me. But I cried bitterly—because I knew I couldn't stay with them—in their dear strange world—I must come back—back to all I hated—all that strangled and hindered me.'

The voice paused a moment. Through Lucy's mind certain incredible words which it had spoken echoed and re-echoed. Consciousness did not master them; but they made a murmur within it through which other sounds hardly penetrated. Yet she struggled with herself—she remembered that only clearness of brain could save her.

She raised herself higher on her pillows that she might bring herself more on a level with her unbidden guest.

'And these ideas gave you pleasure?' she said, almost with calm.

'The intensest happiness,' said the low, dragging tones. 'Others pity me.—"Poor creature—she's mad"—I heard them say. And it made me smile. For I had powers they knew nothing of; I could pass from one world to another; one place to another. I could see in a living person the soul of another dead long ago. And everything spoke to me—the movement of leaves on a tree—the eyes of an animal—all kinds of numbers and arrangements that come across one in the day. Other people noticed nothing. To me it was all alive—everything was alive. Sometimes I was so happy, so ecstatic, I could hardly breathe. The people who pitied me seemed to me dull and crawling beings. If they had only known! But now—'

A long breath came from the darkness—a breath of pain. And again the figure raised its hand to its head.

'Now—somehow, it is all different. When John comes, he is cold and unkind—he won't open to me the old sights. He shows me things instead that shake me with misery—that kill me. My brain is darkening—its powers are dying out. That means that I must let this life go—I must pass into another. Some other soul must give me room. Do you understand?'

Closer came the form. Lucy perceived the white face and the dimly burning eyes, she felt herself suffocating, but she dared make no sudden move for fear of that closed hand and what it held.

'No—I don't understand,' she said faintly; 'but I am sure—no good can come to you—from another's harm.'

'What harm would it be? You are beginning to love—and your love will never make you happy. My brother is like me. He is not mad—but he has a being apart. If you cling to him, he puts you from him—if you love him he tires. He has never loved but for his own pleasure—to complete his life. How could you complete his life? What have you that he wants? His mind now is full of you—his senses, his feeling are touched—but in three weeks he would weary of and despise you. Besides—you know—you know well—that is not all. There is another woman—whose life you must trample on—and you are not made of stuff strong enough for that. No, there is no hope for you, in this existence—this body. But there is no death; death is only a change from one form of being to another. Give up your life, then—as I will give up mine. We will escape together. I can guide you—I know the way. We shall find endless joy—endless power! I shall be with Octave then, as and when I please—and you with Edward. Come!'

The face bent nearer, and the iron hold closed again stealthily on the girl's wrist. Lucy lay with her own face turned away and her eyes shut. She scarcely breathed. A word of prayer passed through her mind—an image of her white-haired uncle, her second father left alone and desolate.

Suddenly there was a quick movement beside her. Her heart fluttered wildly. Then she opened her eyes. Alice Manisty had sprung up, had gone to the window, and flung back the muslin curtains. Lucy could see her now quite plainly in the moonlight—the haggard energy of look and movement, the wild dishevelled hair.

'I knew the end was come—this afternoon,' said the hurrying voice. 'When I came out to you, as I walked along the terrace—the sun went out! I saw it turn black above the Campagna—all in a moment—and I said to myself, "What will the world do without the sun?—how will it live?" And now—do you see?'—she raised her arm, and Lucy saw it for an instant as a black bar against the window, caught the terrible dignity of gesture,—'there is not one moon—but many! Look at them! How they hurry through the clouds—one after the other! Do you understand what that means? Perhaps not—for your sight is not like mine. But I know. It means that the earth has left its orbit—that we are wandering—wandering in space—like a dismasted vessel! We are tossed this way and that, sometimes nearer to the stars—and sometimes further away. That is why they are first smaller—and then larger. But the crash must come at last—death for the world—death for us all—'

Her hands fell to her side, the left hand always tightly closed—her head drooped; her voice, which had been till now hoarse and parched as though it came from a throat burnt with fever, took a deep dirge-like note. Noiselessly Lucy raised herself—she measured the distance between herself and the door—between the mad woman and the door. Oh God!—was the door locked? Her eyes strained through the darkness. How deep her sleep must have been that she had heard no sound of its yielding! Her hand was ready to throw off the shawl that covered her, when she was startled by a laugh—a laugh vile and cruel that seemed to come from a new presence—another being. Alice Manisty rapidly came back to her, stood between her bed and the wall, and Lucy felt instinctively that some hideous change had passed.

'Dalgetty thought that all was safe, so did Edward. And indeed the locks were safe—the only doors that hold in all the villa—I tried yours in the afternoon while Manisty and the priest were talking! But mine held. So I had to deal with Dalgetty.' She stooped, and whispered:—'I got it in Venice one day—the chemist near the Rialto. She might have found it—but she never did—she is very stupid. I did her no harm—I think. But if it kills her, death is nothing!—nothing!—only the gate of life. Come!—come! prove it!'

A hand darted and fell, like a snake striking. Lucy just threw herself aside in time—she sprang up—she rushed—she tore at the door—pulling at it with a frantic strength. It yielded with a crash, for the lock was already broken. Should she turn left or right?—to the room of Mrs. Burgoyne's maid, or to Mr. Manisty's library? She chose the right and fled on. She had perhaps ten seconds start, since the bed had been between her enemy and the door. But if any other door interposed between her and succour, all was over!—for she heard a horrible cry behind her, and knew that she was pursued. On she dashed, across the landing at the head of the stairs. Ah! the dining-room door was open! She passed it, and then turned, holding it desperately against her pursuer.

'Mr. Manisty! help!'

The agonised voice rang through the silent rooms. Suddenly—a sound from the library—a chair overturned—a cry—a door flung open. Manisty stood in the light.

He bounded to her side. His strength released hers. The upper part of the door was glass, and that dark gasping form on the other side of it was visible to them both, in a pale dawn light from the glass passage.

'Go!'—he said—'Go through my room—find Eleanor!'

She fled. But as she entered the room, she tottered—she fell upon the chair that Manisty had just quitted,—and with a long shudder that relaxed all her young limbs, her senses left her.

Meanwhile the whole apartment was alarmed. The first to arrive upon the scene was the strong housemaid, who found Alice Manisty stretched upon the floor of the glass passage, and her brother kneeling beside her, his clothes and hands torn in the struggle with her delirious violence. Alfredo appeared immediately afterwards; and then Manisty was conscious of the flash of a hand-lamp, and the soft, hurrying step of Eleanor Burgoyne.

She stood in horror at the entrance of the glass passage. Manisty gave his sister into Alfredo's keeping as he rose and went towards her.

'For God's sake'—he said under his breath—'go and see what has happened to Dalgetty.'

He took for granted that Lucy had taken refuge with her, and Eleanor stayed to ask no questions, but fled on to Dalgetty's room. As she opened the door the fumes of chloroform assailed her, and there on the bed lay the unfortunate maid, just beginning to moan herself back to consciousness from beneath the chloroformed handkerchief that had reduced her to impotence.

Her state demanded every care. While Manisty and the housemaid Andreina conveyed Alice Manisty, now in a state of helpless exhaustion, to her room, and secured her there, Alfredo ran for the Marinata doctor. Eleanor and Aunt Pattie forced brandy through the maid's teeth, and did what they could to bring back warmth and circulation.

They were still busy with their task when the elderly Italian arrived who was the communal doctor and chemist of the village. The smell of the room, the sight of the woman, was enough. The man was efficient and discreet, and he threw himself into his work without more questions than were absolutely necessary. In the midst of their efforts Manisty reappeared, panting.

'Ought he not to see Miss Foster too?' he said anxiously to Eleanor Burgoyne.

Eleanor looked at him in astonishment.

A smothered exclamation broke from him. He rushed away, back to the library which he had seen Lucy enter.

The cool clear light was mounting. It penetrated the wooden shutters of the library and mingled with the dying light of the lamp which had served him to read with through the night, beside which, in spite of his utmost efforts, he had fallen asleep at the approach of dawn. There, in the dream-like illumination, he saw Lucy lying within his deep arm-chair. Her face was turned away from him and hidden against the cushion; her black hair streamed over the white folds of her wrapper: one arm was beneath her, the other hung helplessly over her knee.

He went up to her and called her name in an agony.

She moved slightly, made an effort to rouse herself and raised her hand. But the hand fell again, and the word half-formed upon her lips died away. Nothing could be more piteous, more disarmed. Yet even her disarray and helplessness were lovely; she was noble in her defeat; her very abandonment breathed youth and purity; the man's wildly surging thoughts sank abashed.

But words escaped him—words giving irrevocable shape to feeling. For he saw that she could not hear.

'Lucy!—Lucy—dear, beautiful Lucy!'

He hung over her in an ardent silence, his eyes breathing a respect that was the very soul of passion, his hand not daring to touch even a fold of her dress. Meanwhile the door leading to the little passage-room opened noiselessly. Eleanor Burgoyne entered. Manisty was not aware of it. He bent above Lucy in a tender absorption speaking to her as he might have spoken to a child, calling to her, comforting and rousing her. His deep voice had an enchanter's sweetness; and gradually it wooed her back to life. She did not know what he was saying to her, but she responded. Her lids fluttered; she moved in her chair, a deep sigh lifted her breast.

At that moment the door in Eleanor's hand escaped her and swung to. Manisty started back and looked round him.

'Eleanor!—is that you?'

In the barred and ghostly light Eleanor came slowly forward. She looked first at Lucy—then at Manisty. Their eyes met.

Manisty was the first to move uneasily.

'Look at her, Eleanor!—poor child!—Alice must have attacked her in her room. She escaped by a marvel. When I wrestled with Alice, I found this in her hand. One second more, and she would have used it on Miss Foster.'

He took from his pocket a small surgical knife, and looked, shuddering, at its sharpness and its curved point.

Eleanor too shuddered. She laid her hand on Lucy's shoulder, while Manisty withdrew into the shadows of the room.

Lucy raised herself by a great effort. Her first half-conscious impulse was to throw herself into the arms of the woman standing by her. Then as she perceived Eleanor clearly, as her reason came back, and her gaze steadied, the impulse died.

'Will you help me?' she said, simply—holding out her hand and tottering to her feet.

A sudden gleam of natural feeling lit up the frozen whiteness of Eleanor's face. She threw her arm round Lucy's waist, guiding her. And so, closely entwined, the two passed from Manisty's sight.



CHAPTER XII

The sun had already deserted the eastern side of the villa when, on the morning following these events, Lucy woke from a fitful sleep to find Benson standing beside her. Benson had slept in her room since the dawn; and, thanks to exhaustion and the natural powers of youth, Lucy came back to consciousness, weak but refreshed, almost free from fever and in full possession of herself. Nevertheless, as she raised herself in bed to drink the tea that Benson offered her—as she caught a glimpse through the open window of the convent-crowned summit and wooded breast of Monte Cavo, flooded with a broad white sunlight—she had that strange sense of change, of a yesterday irrevocably parted from to-day, that marks the entry into another room of life. The young soul at such times trembles before a power unknown, yet tyrannously felt. All in a moment without our knowledge or co-operation something has happened. Life will never be again as it was last week. 'How?—or why?' the soul cries. 'I knew nothing—willed nothing.' And then dimly, through the dark of its own tumult, the veiled Destiny appears.

Benson was not at all anxious that Lucy should throw off the invalid.

'And indeed, Miss, if I may say so, you'll be least in the way where you are. They're expecting the doctor from Rome directly.'

The maid looked at her curiously. All that the household knew was that Miss Alice Manisty had escaped from her room in the night, after pinioning Dalgetty's arms and throwing a chloroformed handkerchief over her face. Miss Foster, it seemed, had been aroused and alarmed, and Mr. Manisty coming to the rescue had overpowered his sister by the help of the stout cameriera, Andreina. This was all that was certainly known.

Nor did Lucy shew herself communicative. As the maid threw back all the shutters and looped the curtains, the girl watched the summer light conquer the room with a shiver of reminiscence.

'And Mrs. Burgoyne?' she asked eagerly.

The maid hesitated.

'She's up long ago, Miss. But she looks that ill, it's a pity to see her. She and Mr. Manisty had their coffee together an hour ago—and she's been helping him with the arrangements. I am sure it'll be a blessing when the poor lady's put away. It would soon kill all the rest of you.'

'Will she go to-day, Benson?' said Lucy, in a low voice.

The maid replied that she believed that was Mr. Manisty's decision, that he had been ordering a carriage, and that it was supposed two nurses were coming with the doctor. Then she enquired whether she might carry good news of Lucy to Miss Manisty and the master.

Lucy hurriedly begged they might be told that she was quite well, and nobody was to take the smallest trouble about her any more. Benson threw a sceptical look at the girl's blanched cheek, shook her head a little, and departed.

A few minutes afterwards there was a light tap at the door and Eleanor Burgoyne entered.

'You have slept?—you are better,' she said, standing at Lucy's bedside.

'I am only ashamed you should give me a thought,' the girl protested. 'I should be up now but for Benson. She said I should be out of the way.'

'Yes,' said Eleanor quietly. 'That is so.' She hesitated a moment, and then resumed—'If you should hear anything disagreeable don't be alarmed. There will be a doctor and nurses. But she is quite quiet this morning—quite broken—poor soul! My cousins are going into Rome with her. The home where she will be placed is on Monte Mario. Edward wishes to assure himself that it is all suitable and well managed. And Aunt Pattie will go with him.'

Through the girl's mind flashed the thought—'Then we shall be alone together all day,'—and her heart sank. She dared not look into Mrs. Burgoyne's tired eyes. The memory of words spoken to her in the darkness—of that expression she had surprised on Mrs. Burgoyne's face as she woke from her swoon in the library, suddenly renewed the nightmare in which she had been living. Once more she felt herself walking among snares and shadows, with a trembling pulse.

Yet the feeling which rose to sight was nothing more than a stronger form of that remorseful tenderness which had been slowly invading her during many days. She took Eleanor's hand in hers and kissed it shyly.

'Then I shall look after you,' she said trying to smile. 'I'll have my way this time!'

'Wasn't that a carriage?' said Eleanor hurriedly. She listened a moment. Yes—a carriage had drawn up. She hastened away.

Lucy, left alone, could hear the passage of feet through the glass passage, and the sound of strange voices, representing apparently two men, and neither of them Mr. Manisty.

She took a book from her table and tried not to listen. But she could not distract her mind from the whole scene which she imagined must be going on,—the consultation of the doctors, the attitude of the brother.

How had Mr. Manisty dealt with his sister the night before? What weapon was in Alice Manisty's hand? Lucy remembered no more after that moment at the door, when Manisty had rushed to her relief, bidding her go to Mrs. Burgoyne. He himself had not been hurt, or Mrs. Burgoyne would have told her. Ah!—he had surely been kind, though strong. Her eyes filled. She thought of the new light in which he had appeared to her during these terrible days with his sister; the curb put on his irritable, exacting temper; his care of Alice, his chivalry towards herself. In another man such conduct would have been a matter of course. In Manisty it touched and captured, because it could not have been reckoned on. She had done him injustice, and—unknowing—he had revenged himself.

The first carriage apparently drove away; and after an interval another replaced it. Nearly an hour passed:—then sudden sounds of trampling feet and opening doors broke the silence which had settled over the villa. Voices and steps approached, entered the glass passage. Lucy sprang up. Benson had flung the window looking on the balcony and the passage open, but had fastened across it the outside sun-shutters. Lucy, securely hidden herself, could see freely through the wooden strips of the shutter.

Ah!—sad procession! Manisty came first through the passage, the sides of which were open to the balcony. His sister was on his arm, veiled and in black. She moved feebly, sometimes hesitating and pausing, and Lucy distinguished the wild eyes, glancing from side to side. But Manisty bent his fine head to her; his left hand secured hers upon his arm; he spoke to her gently and cheerfully. Behind walked Aunt Pattie, very small and nervously pale, followed by a nurse. Then two men—Lucy recognised one as the Marinata doctor—and another nurse; then Alfredo, with luggage.

They passed rapidly out of her sight. But the front door was immediately below the balcony, and her ear could more or less follow the departure. And there was Mrs. Burgoyne, leaning over the balcony. Mr. Manisty spoke to her from below. Lucy fancied she caught her own name, and drew back indignant with herself for listening.

Then a sound of wheels—the opening of the iron gate—the driving up of another carriage—some shouting between Alfredo and Andreina—and it was all over. The villa was at peace again.

Lucy drew herself to her full height, in a fierce rigidity of self-contempt. What was she still listening for—still hungering for? What seemed to have gone suddenly out of heaven and earth, with the cessation of one voice?

She fell on her knees beside her bed. It was natural to her to pray, to throw herself on a sustaining and strengthening power. Such prayer in such a nature is not the specific asking of a definite boon. It is rather a wordless aspiration towards a Will not our own—a passionate longing, in the old phrase, to be 'right with God,' whatever happens, and through all the storms of personal impulse.

* * * * *

An hour later Lucy entered the salon just as Alfredo, coming up behind her, announced that the midday breakfast was ready. Mrs. Burgoyne was sitting near the western window with her sketching things about her. Some western clouds had come up from the sea to veil the scorching heat with which the day had opened. Eleanor had thrown the sun-shutters hack, and was finishing and correcting one of the Nemi sketches she had made during the winter.

She rose at sight of Lucy.

'Such a relief to throw oneself into a bit of drawing!' She looked down at her work. 'What hobby do you fly to?'

'I mend the house-linen, and I tie down the jam,' said Lucy, laughing. 'You have heard me play—so you know I don't do that well! And I can't draw a hay-stack.'

'You play very well,' said Eleanor embarrassed, as they moved towards the dining-room.

'Just well enough to send Uncle Ben to sleep when he's tired! I learnt it for that. Will you play to me afterwards?'

'With pleasure,' said Eleanor, a little formally.

How long the luncheon seemed! Eleanor, a white shadow in her black transparent dress, toyed with her food, eat nothing, and complained of the waits between the courses.

Lucy reminded her that there were fifty steps between the kitchen and their apartment. Eleanor did not seem to hear her; she had apparently forgotten her own remark, and was staring absently before her. When she spoke next it was about London, and the June season. She had promised to take a young cousin, just 'come out,' to some balls. Her talk about her plans was careless and languid, but it showed the woman naturally at home in the fashionable world, with connections in half the great families, and access to all doors. The effect of it was to make Lucy shrink into herself. Mrs. Burgoyne had spoken formerly of their meeting in London. She said nothing of it to-day, and Lucy felt that she could never venture to remind her.

From Eleanor's disjointed talk, also, there flowed another subtle impression. Lucy realised what kinship means to the English wealthy and well-born class—what a freemasonry it establishes, what opportunities it confers. The Manistys and Eleanor Burgoyne were part of a great clan with innumerable memories and traditions. They said nothing of them; they merely took them for granted with all that they implied, the social position, the 'consideration,' the effect on others.

The American girl is not easily overawed. The smallest touch of English assumption in her new acquaintances would have been enough, six weeks before, to make Lucy Foster open her dark eyes in astonishment or contempt. That is not the way in which women of her type understand life.

But to-day the frank forces of the girl's nature felt themselves harassed and crippled. She sat with downcast eyes, constrainedly listening and sometimes replying. No—it was very true. Mr. Manisty was not of her world. He had relations, friendships, affairs, infinitely remote from hers—none of which could mean anything to her. Whereas his cousin's links with him were the natural inevitable links of blood and class. He might be unsatisfactory or uncivil; but she had innumerable ways of recovering him, not to be understood even, by those outside.

When the two women returned to the salon, a kind of moral distance had established itself between them. Lucy was silent; Eleanor restless.

Alfredo brought the coffee. Mrs. Burgoyne looked at her watch as he retired.

'Half past one,' she said in a reflective voice. 'By now they have made all arrangements.'

'They will be back by tea-time?'

'Hardly,—but before dinner. Poor Aunt Pattie! She will be half dead.'

'Was she disturbed last night?' asked Lucy in a low voice.

'Just at the end. Mercifully she heard nothing till Alice was safe in her room.'

Then Eleanor's eyes dwelt broodingly on Lucy. She had never yet questioned the girl as to her experiences. Now she said with a certain abruptness—

'I suppose she forced your door?'

'I suppose so.—But I was asleep.'

'Were you terribly frightened when you found her there?'

As she spoke Eleanor said to herself that in all probability Lucy knew nothing of Manisty's discovery of the weapon in Alice's hand. While she was helping the girl to bed, Lucy, in her dazed and shivering submission, was true to her natural soberness and reserve. Instead of exaggerating, she had minimised what had happened. Miss Alice Manisty had come to her room,—had behaved strangely,—and Lucy, running to summon assistance, had roused Mr. Manisty in the library. No doubt she might have managed better, both then and in the afternoon. And so, with a resolute repression of all excited talk, she had turned her blanched face from the light, and set herself to go to sleep, as the only means of inducing Mrs. Burgoyne also to leave her and rest.

Eleanor's present question, however, set the girl's self-control fluttering, so sharply did it recall the horror of the night. She curbed herself visibly before replying.

'Yes,—I was frightened. But I don't think she could have hurt me. I should have been stronger when it came to the point.'

'Thank God Edward was there!' cried Eleanor.

'Where did he come to you?'

'At the dining-room door. I could not have held it much longer. Then he told me to go to you. And I tried to. But I only just managed to get to that chair in the library.'

'Mr. Manisty found you quite unconscious.'

A sudden red dyed Lucy's cheek.

'Mr. Manisty!—was he there? I hoped he knew nothing about it. I only saw you.'

Eleanor's thought drew certain inferences. But they gave her little comfort. She turned away abruptly, complaining of the heat, and went to the piano.

Lucy sat listening, with a book on her knee. Everything seemed to have grown strangely unreal in this hot silence of the villa—the high room with its painted walls—the marvellous prospect outside, just visible in sections through the half-closed shutters—herself and her companion. Mrs. Burgoyne played snatches of Brahms and Chopin; but her fingers stumbled more than usual. Her attention seemed to wander.

Inevitably the girl's memory went back to the wild things which Alice Manisty had said to her. In vain she rebuked herself. The fancies of a mad-woman were best forgotten,—so common-sense told her. But over the unrest of her own heart, over the electrical tension and dumb hostility that had somehow arisen between her and Eleanor Burgoyne, common-sense had small power. She could only say to herself with growing steadiness of purpose that it would be best for her not to go to Vallombrosa, but to make arrangements as soon as possible to join the Porters' friends at Florence, and go on with them to Switzerland.

To distract herself, she presently drew towards her the open portfolio of Eleanor's sketches, which was lying on the table. Most of them she had seen before, and Mrs. Burgoyne had often bade her turn them over as she pleased.

She looked at them, now listlessly, now with sudden stirs of feeling. Here was the niched wall of the Nemi temple; the arched recesses overgrown with ilex and fig and bramble; in front the strawberry pickers stooping to their work. Here, an impressionist study of the lake at evening, with the wooded height of Genzano breaking the sunset; here a sketch from memory of Aristodemo teasing the girls. Below this drawing, lay another drawing of figures. Lucy drew it out, and looked at it in bewilderment.

At the foot of it was written—'The Slayer and the Slain.' Her thoughts rushed back to her first evening at the villa—to the legend of the priest. The sketch indeed contained two figures—one erect and triumphant, the other crouching on the ground. The prostrate figure was wrapped in a cloak which was drawn over the head and face. The young victor, sword in hand, stood above his conquered enemy.

Or—Was it a man?

Lucy looked closer, her cold hand shaking on the paper. The vague classical dress told nothing. But the face—whose was it?—and the long black hair? She raised her eyes towards an old mirror on the wall in front, then dropped them to the drawing again, in a sudden horror of recognition. And the piteous figure on the ground, with the delicate woman's hand?—Lucy caught her breath. It was as though the blow at her heart, which Manisty had averted the night before, had fallen.

Then she became aware that Eleanor had turned round upon her seat at the piano, and was watching her.

'I was looking at this strange drawing,' she said. Her face had turned a sudden crimson. She pushed the drawing from her and tried to smile.

Eleanor rose and came towards her.

'I thought you would see it,' she said. 'I wished you to see it.'

Her voice was hoarse and shaking. She stood opposite to Lucy, supporting herself by a marble table that stood near.

Lucy's colour disappeared, she became as pale as Eleanor.

'Is this meant for me?'

She pointed to the figure of the victorious priest. Eleanor nodded.

'I drew it the night after our Nemi walk,' she said with a fluttering breath. 'A vision came to me so—of you—and me.'

Lucy started. Then she put her arms on the table and dropped her face into her arms. Her voice became a low and thrilling murmur that just reached Eleanor's ears.

'I wish—oh! how I wish—that I had never come here!'

Eleanor wavered a moment, then she said with gentleness, even with sweetness:

'You have nothing to blame yourself for. Nor has anyone. That picture accuses no one. It draws the future—which no one can stop or change—but you.'

'In the first place,' said Lucy, still hiding her eyes and the bitter tears that dimmed them—'what does it mean? Why am I the slayer?—and—and—you the slain? What have I done? How have I deserved such a thing?'

Her voice failed her. Eleanor drew a little nearer.

'It is not you—but fate. You have taken from me—or you are about to take from me—the last thing left to me on this earth! I have had one chance of happiness, and only one, in all my life, till now. My boy is dead—he has been dead eight years. And at last I had found another chance—and after seven weeks, you—you—are dashing it from me!'

Lucy drew back from the table, like one that shrinks from an enemy.

'Mrs. Burgoyne!'

'You don't know it!' said Eleanor calmly. 'Oh! I understand that. You are too good—too loyal. That's why I am talking like this. One could only dare it with some one whose heart one knew. Oh! I have had such gusts of feeling towards you—such mean, poor feeling. And then, as I sat playing there, I said to myself, "I'll tell her! She will find that drawing, and—I'll tell her! She has a great, true nature—she'll understand. Why shouldn't one try to save oneself? It's the natural law. There's only the one life."'

She covered her eyes with her hand an instant, choking down the sob which interrupted her. Then she moved a little nearer to Lucy.

'You see,' she said, appealing,—'you were very sweet and tender to me one day. It's very easy to pretend to mourn with other people—because one thinks one ought—or because it makes one liked. I am always pretending in that way—I can't help it. But you—no: you don't say what you don't feel, and you've the gift to feel. It's so rare—and you'll suffer from it. You'll find other people doing what I'm doing now—throwing themselves upon you—taking advantage—trusting to you. You pitied mo because I had lost my boy. But you didn't know—you couldn't guess how bare my life has been always—but for him. And then—this winter—' her voice changed and broke—'the sun rose again for me. I have been hungry and starving for years, and it seemed as though I—even I!—might still feast and be satisfied.

'It would not have taken much to satisfy me. I am not young, like you—I don't ask much. Just to be his friend, his secretary, his companion—in time—perhaps—his wife—when he began to feel the need of home, and peace—and to realise that no one else was so dear or so familiar to him as I. I understood him—he me—our minds touched. There was no need for "falling in love." One had only to go on from day to day—entering into each other's lives—I ministering to him and he growing accustomed to the atmosphere I could surround him with, and the sympathy I could give him—till the habit had grown so deep into heart and flesh that it could not be wrenched away. His hand would have dropped into mine, almost without his willing or knowing it.... And I should have made him happy. I could have lessened his faults—stimulated his powers. That was my dream all these later months—and every week it seemed to grow more reasonable, more possible. Then you came—'

She dropped into a chair beside Lucy, resting her delicate hands on the back of it. In the mingled abandonment and energy of her attitude, there was the power that belongs to all elemental human emotion, made frankly visible and active. All her plaintive clinging charm had disappeared. It was the fierceness of the dove—the egotism of the weak. Every line and nerve of the fragile form betrayed the exasperation of suffering and a tension of the will, unnatural and irresistible. Lucy bowed to the storm. She lay with her eyes hidden, conscious only of this accusing voice close to her,—and of the song of two nightingales without, rivalling each other among the chestnut trees above the lower road. Eleanor resumed after a momentary pause—a momentary closing of the tired eyes, as though in search of calm and recollection.

'You came. He took no notice of you. He was rude and careless—he complained that our work would be interrupted. It teased him that you should be here—and that you represented something so different from his thoughts and theories. That is like him. He has no real tolerance. He wants to fight, to overbear, to crush, directly he feels opposition. Among women especially, he is accustomed to be the centre—to be the master always. And you resisted—silently. That provoked and attracted him. Then came the difficulties with the book—and Mr. Neal's visit. He has the strangest superstitions. It was ill-luck, and I was mixed up with it. He began to cool to me—to avoid me. You were here; you didn't remind him of failure. He found relief in talking to you. His ill-humour would all have passed away like a child's sulkiness, but that—Ah! well!—'

She raised her hand with a long, painful sigh, and let it drop.

'Don't imagine I blame anyone. You were so fresh and young—it was all so natural. Yet somehow I never really feared—after the first evening I felt quite at ease. I found myself drawn to like—to love—you. And what could you and he have in common? Then on the Nemi day I dared to reproach him—to appeal to the old times—to show him the depth of my own wound—to make him explain himself. Oh! but all those words are far, far too strong for what I did? Who could ever suppose it to their advantage to make a scene with him—to weary or disgust him? It was only a word—a phrase or two here and there. But he understood,—and he gave me my answer. Oh! what humiliations we women can suffer from a sentence—a smile—and show nothing—nothing!'

Her face had begun to burn. She lifted her handkerchief to brush away two slow tears that had forced their way. Lucy's eyes had been drawn to her from their hiding-place. The girl's brow was furrowed, her lips parted; there was a touch of fear—unconscious, yet visible—in her silence.

'It was that day, while you and he were walking about the ruins, that a flash of light came to me. I suppose I had seen it before. I know I had been unhappy long before! But as long as one can hide things from oneself—it seems to make them not true,—as though one's own will still controlled them. But that day—after our walk—when we came back and found you on the hill-side! How was it your fault? Yet I could almost have believed that you had invented the boys and the stone! Certainly he spared me nothing. He had eyes and ears only for you. After he brought you home all his thoughts were for you. Nobody else's fatigues and discomforts mattered anything. And it was the same with Alice. His only terrors were for you. When he heard that she was coming, he had no alarms for Aunt Pattie or for me. But you must be shielded—you must be saved from everything repulsive or shocking. He sat up last night to protect you—and even in his sleep—he heard you.'

Her voice dropped. Eleanor sat staring before her into the golden shadows of the room, afraid of what she had said, instinctively waiting for its effect on Lucy.

And Lucy crouched no longer. She had drawn herself erect.

'Mrs. Burgoyne, is it kind—is it bearable—that you should say these things to me? I have not deserved them! No! no!—I have not. What right have you? I can't protect myself—I can't escape you—but—'

Her voice shook. There was in it a passion of anger, pain, loneliness, and yet something else—the note of something new-born and transforming.

'What right?' repeated Eleanor, in low tones—tones almost of astonishment. She turned to her companion. 'The right of hunger—the right of poverty—the right of one pleading for a last possession!—a last hope!'

Lucy was silenced. The passion of the older woman bore her down, made the protest of her young modesty seem a mere trifling and impertinence. Eleanor had slid to her knees. Her face had grown tremulous and sweet. A strange dignity quivered in the smile that transformed her mouth as she caught the girl's reluctant hands and drew them against her breast.

'Is it forbidden to cry out when grief—and loss—go beyond a certain point? No!—I think not. I couldn't struggle with you—or plot against you—or hate you. Those things are not in my power. I was not made so. But what forbids mo to come to you and say?—"I have suffered terribly. I had a dreary home. I married, ignorantly, a man who made me miserable. But when my boy came, that made up for all. I never grumbled. I never envied other people after that. It seemed to me I had all I deserved—and so much, much more than many! Afterwards, when I woke up without him that day in Switzerland, there was only one thing that made it endurable. I overheard the Swiss doctor say to my maid—he was a kind old man and very sorry for me—that my own health was so fragile that I shouldn't live long to pine for the child. But oh!—what we can bear and not die! I came back to my father, and for eight years I never slept without crying—without the ghost of the boy's head against my breast. Again and again I used to wake up in an ecstasy, feeling it there—feeling the curls across my mouth."' A deep sob choked her. Lucy, in a madness of pity, struggled to release herself that she might throw her arms round the kneeling figure. But Eleanor's grasp only tightened. She hurried on.

'But last year, I began to hope. Everybody thought badly of me; the doctors spoke very strongly; and even Papa made no objection when Aunt Pattie asked me to come to Rome. I came to Rome in a strange state—as one looks at things and loves them, for the last time, before a journey. And then—well, then it all began!—new life for me, new health. The only happiness—except for the child—that had ever come my way. I know—oh! I don't deceive myself—I know it was not the same to Edward as to me. But I don't ask much. I knew he had given the best of his heart to other women—long ago—long before this. But the old loves were all dead, and I could almost be thankful for them. They had kept him for me, I thought,—tamed and exhausted him, so that I—so colourless and weak compared to those others!—might just slip into his heart and find the way open—that he might just take me in, and be glad, for sheer weariness.'

She dropped Lucy's hands, and rising, she locked her own, and began to walk to and fro in the great room; her head thrown back, her senses turned as it were inward upon the sights and sounds of memory.

Lucy gazed upon her in bewilderment. Then she too rose and approached Mrs. Burgoyne.

'When shall I go?' she said simply. 'You must help me to arrange it with Miss Manisty. It might be to-morrow—it would be easy to find some excuse.'

Eleanor looked at her with a convulsed face.

'That would help nothing,' she said—'nothing! He would guess what I had done.'

Lucy was silent a moment. Then she broke out piteously.

'What can I do?'

'What claim have I that you should do anything?' said Eleanor despairingly. 'I don't know what I wanted, when I began this scene.'

She moved on, her eyes bent upon the ground—Lucy beside her.

The girl had drawn Mrs. Burgoyne's arm through her own. The tears were on her check, but she was thinking, and quite calm.

'I believe,' she said at last, in a voice that was almost steady—'that all your fears are quite, quite vain. Mr. Manisty feels for me nothing but a little kindness—he could feel nothing else. It will all come back to you—and it was not I that took it away. But—whatever you tell me—whatever you ask, I will do.'

With a catching breath Eleanor turned and threw her arm round the girl's neck.

'Stay,' she breathed—'stay for a few days. Let there be no shock—nothing to challenge him. Then slip away—don't let him know where—and there is one woman in the world who will hold you in her inmost heart, who will pray for you with her secretest, sacredest prayers, as long as you live!'

The two fell into each other's embrace. Lucy, with the maternal tenderness that should have been Eleanor's, pressed her lips on the hot brow that lay upon her breast, murmuring words of promise, of consolation, of self-reproach, feeling her whole being passing out to Eleanor's in a great tide of passionate will and pity.



CHAPTER XIII

They were all going down to the midday train for Rome.

At last the Ambassador—who had been passing through a series of political and domestic difficulties, culminating in the mutiny of his Neapolitan cook—had been able to carry out his whim. A luncheon had been arranged for the young American girl who had taken his fancy. At the head of his house for the time being was his married daughter, Lady Mary, who had come from India for the winter to look after her babies and her father. When she was told to write the notes for this luncheon, she lifted her eyebrows in good-humoured astonishment.

'My dear,' said the Ambassador, 'we have been doing our duty for six months—and I find it pall!'

He had been entertaining Royalties and Cabinet Ministers in heavy succession, and his daughter understood. There was an element of insubordination in her father, which she knew better than to provoke.

So the notes were sent.

'Find her some types, my dear,' said the Ambassador;—'and little of everything.'

Lady Mary did her best. She invited an Italian Marchesa whom she had heard her father describe as 'the ablest woman in Rome,' while she herself knew her as one of the most graceful and popular; a young Lombard landowner formerly in the Navy, now much connected with the Court, whose blue eyes moreover were among the famous things of the day; a Danish professor and savant who was also a rich man, collector of flints and torques, and other matters of importance to primitive man; an artist or two; an American Monsignore blessed with some Irish wit and much influence; Reggie Brooklyn, of course, and his sister; Madame Variani, who would prevent Mr. Manisty from talking too much nonsense; and a dull English Admiral and his wife, official guests, whom the Ambassador admitted at the last moment with a groan, as still representing the cold tyranny of duty invading his snatch of pleasure.

'And Mr. Bellasis, papa?' said Lady Mary, pausing, pen in hand, like Fortitude prepared for all extremities.

'Heavens, no!' said the Ambassador, hastily. 'I have put him off twice. This time I should have to read him.'

* * * * *

Manisty accordingly was smoking on the balcony of the villa while he waited for the ladies to appear. Miss Manisty, who was already suffering from the heat, was not going. The fact did not improve Manisty's temper. Three is no company—that we all know.

If Lady Mary, indeed, had only planned this luncheon because she must, Manisty was going to it under a far more impatient sense of compulsion. It would be a sickening waste of time. Nothing now had any attraction for him, nothing seemed to him desirable or important, but that conversation with Lucy Foster which he was bent on securing, and she apparently was bent on refusing him.

His mind was full of the sense of injury. During all the day before, while he had been making the arrangements for his unhappy sister—during the journeys backward and forward to Rome—a delicious image had filled all the background of his thoughts, the image of the white Lucy, helpless and lovely, lying unconscious in his chair.

In the evening he could hardly command his eagerness sufficiently to help his tired little aunt up the steps of the station, and put her safely in her cab, before hurrying himself up the steep short-cut to the villa. Should he find her perhaps on the balcony, conscious of his step on the path below, weak and shaken, yet ready to lift those pure, tender eyes of hers to his in a shy gratitude?

He had found no one on the balcony, and the evening of that trying day had been one of baffling disappointment. Eleanor was in her room, apparently tired out by the adventures of the night before; and although Miss Foster appeared at dinner she had withdrawn immediately afterwards, and there had been no chance for anything but the most perfunctory conversation.

She had said of course all the proper things, so far as they could be said. 'I trust you have been able to make the arrangements you wished. Mrs. Burgoyne and I have been so sorry! Poor Miss Manisty must have had a very tiring day—'

Bah!—he could not have believed that a girl could speak so formally, so trivially to a man who within twenty-four hours had saved her from the attack of a madwoman. For that was what it came to—plainly. Did she know what had happened? Had her swoon blotted it all out? If so, was he justified in revealing it. There was an uneasy feeling that it would be more chivalrous towards her, and kinder towards his sister, if he left the veil drawn, seeing that she seemed to wish it so—if he said no more about her fright, her danger, her faint. But Manisty was not accustomed to let himself be governed by the scruples of men more precise or more timid. He wished passionately to force a conversation with her more intimate, more personal than any one had yet allowed him; to break down at a stroke most if not all of the barriers that separate acquaintance from—

From what? He stood, cigarette in hand, staring blindly at the garden, lost in an intense questioning of himself.

Suddenly he found himself back again, as it were, among the feelings and sensations of Lucy Foster's first Sunday at the villa; his repugnance towards any notion of marriage; his wonder that anybody should suppose that he had any immediate purpose of marrying Eleanor Burgoyne; the mood, half lazy, half scornful, in which he had watched Lucy, in her prim Sunday dress, walking along the avenue.

What had attracted him to this girl so different from himself, so unacquainted with his world?

There was her beauty of course. But he had passed the period when mere beauty is enough. He was extremely captious and difficult to please where the ordinary pretty woman was concerned. Her arts left him now quite unmoved. Of self-conscious vanity and love of effect he had himself enough and to spare. He could not mend himself; but he was often weary of his own weaknesses, and detested them in other people. If Lucy Foster had been merely a beauty, aware of her own value, and bent upon making him aware of it also, he would probably have been as careless of her now in the eighth week of their acquaintance as he had been in the first.

But it was a beauty so innocent, so interfused with suggestion, with an enchanting thrill of prophecy! It was not only what she said and looked, but what a man might divine in her—the 'white fire' of a nature most pure, most passionate, that somehow flashed through her maiden life and aspect, fighting with the restraints imposed upon it, and constantly transforming what might otherwise have been a cold seemliness into a soft and delicate majesty.

In short, there was a mystery in Lucy, for all her simplicity;—a mystery of feeling, which piqued and held the fastidious taste of Manisty. It was this which made her loveliness tell. Her sincerity was so rich and full, that it became dramatic,—a thing to watch, for the mere joy of the fresh, unfolding spectacle. She was quite unconscious of this significance of hers. Rather she was clearly and always conscious of weakness, ignorance, inexperience. And it was this lingering childishness, compared with the rarity, the strength, the tenderness of the nature just emerging from the sheath of first youth, that made her at this moment so exquisitely attractive to Manisty.

In the presence of such a creature marriage began to look differently. Like many men with an aristocratic family tradition, who have lived for a time as though they despised it, there were in him deep stores of things inherited and conventional which re-emerged at the fitting moment. Manisty disliked and had thrown aside the role of country gentleman; because, in truth, he had not money enough to play it magnificently, and he had set himself against marriage; because no woman had yet appeared to make the probable boredoms of it worth while.

But now, as he walked up and down the balcony, plunged in meditation, he began to think with a new tolerance of the English cadre and the English life. He remembered all those illustrious or comely husbands and wives, his forebears, whose portraits hung on the walls of his neglected house. For the first time it thrilled him to imagine a new mistress of the house—young, graceful, noble—moving about below them. And even—for the first time—there gleamed from out the future the dim features of a son, and he did not recoil. He caressed the whole dream with a new and strange complacency. What if after all the beaten roads are best?

To the old paths, my soul!

Then he paused, in a sudden chill of realisation. His thoughts might rove as they please. But Lucy Foster had given them little warrant. To all her growing spell upon him, there was added indeed the charm of difficulty foreseen, and delighted in. He was perfectly aware that he puzzled and attracted her. And he was perfectly aware also of his own power with women, often cynically aware of it. But he could not flatter himself that so far he had any hold over the senses or the heart of Lucy Foster. He thought of her eager praise of his Palestine letters—of the Nemi tale. She was franker, more enthusiastic than an English girl would have been—and at the same time more remote, infinitely more incalculable!

His mind filled with a delicious mingling of desire and doubt. He foresaw the sweet approach of new emotions,—of spells to make 'the colours freshen on this threadbare world.' All his life he had been an epicurean, in search of pleasures beyond the ken of the crowd. It was pleasure of this kind that beckoned to him now,—in the wooing, the conquering, the developing of Lucy.

A voice struck on his ear. It was Eleanor calling to Lucy from the salon.

Ah!—Eleanor? A rush of feeling—half generous, half audacious—came upon him. He knew that he had given her pain at Nemi. He had been a brute, an ungrateful brute! Women like Eleanor have very exalted and sensitive ideals of friendship. He understood that he had pulled down Eleanor's ideal, that he had wounded her sorely. What did she expect of him? Not any of the things which the ignorant or vulgar bystander expected of him—that he was certain. But still her claim had wearied him; and he had brushed it aside. His sulkiness about the book had been odious, indefensible. And yet—perhaps from another point of view—it had not been a bad thing for either of them. It had broken through habits which had become, surely, an embarrassment to both.

But now, let him make amends; select fresh ground; and from it rebuild their friendship. His mind ran forward hazily to some bold confidence or other, some dramatic appeal to Eleanor for sympathy and help.

The affection between her and Miss Foster seemed to be growing closer. He thought of it uncomfortably, and with vague plannings of counter-strokes. It did not suit him—nay, it presented itself somehow as an obstacle in his path. For he had a half remorseful, half humorous feeling that Eleanor knew him too well.

* * * * *

'Ah! my dear lady,' said the Ambassador—'how few things in this world one does to please oneself! This is one of them.'

Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the Ambassador's left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an instant on hers, with a charming and paternal freedom.

'Have you enjoyed yourself?—Have you lost your heart to Italy?' said her host, stooping to her. He was amused to see the transformation in her, the pretty dress, the developed beauty.

'I have been in fairy-land,' said Lucy, shyly, opening her blue eyes upon him. 'Nothing can ever be like it again.'

'No—because one can never be twenty again,' said the old man, sighing. 'Twenty years hence you will wonder where the magic came from. Never mind—just now, anyway, the world's your oyster.'

Then he looked at her a little more closely. And it seemed to him that, though she was handsomer, she was not so happy. He missed some of that quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before, and there were some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was wrong? Had she met the man—the appointed one?

He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and stately.

'We must all have our ups and downs,' he said to her presently. 'Let me just give you a word of advice. It'll carry you through most of them. Remember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old.'

He stopped and surveyed her. His kind humorous eyes blinked through their blanched lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling expectancy.

'Learn Persian!' said the old man in an urgent whisper—'and get the dictionary by heart!'

Lucy still looked—wondering.

'I finished it this morning,' said the Ambassador, in her ear. 'To-morrow I shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of the thing. She says I over-tire myself, and that when old people have done their work they should take a nap. But I know that if it weren't for my dictionary, I should have given up long ago. When too many tiresome people dine here in the evening—or when they worry me from home—I take a column. But generally half a column's enough—good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh! of course I can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But that's the whipped cream. That don't count. What one wants is something to set one's teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I put half Tommy Moore into hendecasyllables. But my youngest boy who's at Oxford, said he wouldn't be responsible for them—so I had to desist. And I suppose the mathematicians have always something handy. But, one way or another, one must learn one's dictionary. It comes next to cultivating one's garden. Now Mr. Manisty—how is he provided in that way?'

His sudden question took Lucy by surprise, and the quick rise of colour in the clear cheeks did not escape him.

'Well—I suppose he has his book?' she said, smiling.

'Oh! no use at all! He can do what he likes with his book. But you can't do what you like with the dictionary. You must take it or leave it. That's what makes it so reposeful. Now if I were asked, I could soon find some Persian roots for Mr. Manisty—to be taken every day!'

Lucy glanced across the table. Her eyes fell, and she said in the low full voice that delighted the old man's ears:

'I suppose you would send him home?'

The Ambassador nodded.

'Tenants, turnips, and Petty Sessions! Persian's pleasanter—but those would serve.'

He paused a moment, then said seriously, under the cover of a loud buzz of talk, 'He's wasting his time, dear lady—there's no doubt of that.'

Lucy still looked down, but her attitude changed imperceptibly. 'The subject interests her!' thought the old man. 'It's a thousand pities,' he resumed, with the caution, masked by the ease, of the diplomat, 'he came out here in a fit of pique. He saw false—and as far as I can hear, the book's a mistake. Yet it was not a bad subject. Italy is just now an object lesson and a warning. But our friend there could not have taken it more perversely. He has chosen to attack not the violence of the Church—but the weakness of the State. And meanwhile—if I may be allowed to say so—his own position is something of an offence. Religion is too big a pawn for any man's personal game. Don't you agree? Often I feel inclined to apply to him the saying about Benjamin Constant and liberty—"Grand homme devant la religion—s'il y croyait!" I compare with him a poor old persecuted priest I know—Manisty knows too.—Ah! well, I hear the book is very brilliant—and venomous to a degree. It will be read of course. He has the power to be read. But it is a blunder—if not a crime. And meanwhile he is throwing away all his chances. I knew his father. I don't like to see him beating the air. If you have any influence with him'—the old man smiled—'send him home! Or Mrs. Burgoyne there. He used to listen to her.'

A great pang gripped Lucy's heart.

'I should think he always took his own way,' she said, with difficulty. 'Mr. Neal sometimes advises him.'

The Ambassador's shrewd glance rested upon her for a moment. Then without another word he turned away. 'Reggie!' he said, addressing young Brooklyn, 'you seem to be ill-treating Madame Variani. Must I interpose?'

Reggie and his companion, who were in a full tide of 'chaff' and laughter, turned towards him.

'Sir,' said Brooklyn, 'Madame Variani is attacking my best friend.'

'Many of us find that agreeable,' said the Ambassador.

'Ah! but she makes it so personal,' said Reggie, dallying with his banana. 'She abuses him because he's not married—and calls him a selfish fop. Now I'm not married—and I object to these wholesale classifications. Besides, my friend has the most conclusive answer.'

'I wait for it,' said Madame Variani.

Reggie delicately unsheathed his banana.

'Well, some of us once enquired what he meant by it, and he said: "My dear fellow, I've asked all the beautiful women I know to marry me, and they won't! Now!—I'd be content with cleanliness and conduct."'

There was a general laugh, in the midst of which Reggie remarked:

'I thought it the most touching situation. But Madame Variani has the heart of a stone.'

Madame Variani looked down upon him unmoved. She and the charming lad were fast friends.

'I will wager you he never asked,' she said quietly.

Reggie protested.

'No—he never asked. Englishmen don't ask ladies to marry them any more.'

'Let Madame Variani prove her point,' said the Ambassador, raising one white hand above the hubbub, while he hollowed the other round his deaf ear. 'This is a most interesting discussion.'

'But it is known to all that Englishmen don't get married any more!' cried Madame Variani. 'I read in an English novel the other day that it is spoiling your English society, that the charming girls wait and wait—and nobody marries them.'

'Well, there are no English young ladies present,' said the Ambassador, looking round the table; 'so we may proceed. How do you account for this phenomenon, Madame?'

'Oh! you have now too many French cooks in England!' said Madame Variani, shrugging her plump shoulders.

'What in the world has that got to do with it?' cried the Ambassador.

'Your young men are too comfortable,' said the lady, with a calm wave of the hand towards Reggie Brooklyn. 'That's what I am told. I ask an English lady, who knows both France and England—and she tells me—your young men get now such good cooking at their clubs, and at the messes of their regiments—and their sports amuse them so well, and cost so much money—they don't want any wives!—they are not interested any more in the girls. That is the difference between them and the Frenchman. The Frenchman is still interested in the ladies. After dinner the Frenchman wants to go and sit with the ladies—the Englishman, no! That is why the French are still agreeable.'

The small black eyes of the speaker sparkled, but otherwise she looked round with challenging serenity on the English and Americans around her. Madame Variani—stout, clever, middle-aged, and disinterested—had a position of her own in Rome. She was the correspondent of a leading French paper; she had many English friends; and she and the Marchesa Fazzoleni, at the Ambassador's right hand, had just been doing wonders for the relief of the Italian sick and wounded after the miserable campaign of Adowa.

'Oh! I hide my diminished head!' said the old Ambassador, taking his white locks in both hands. 'All I know is, I have sent twenty wedding presents already this year—and that the state of my banking account is wholly inconsistent with these theories.'

'Ah! you are exceptional,' said the lady. 'Only this morning I get an account of an English gentleman of my acquaintance. He is nearly forty—he possesses a large estate—his mother and sisters are on their knees to him to marry—it will all go to a cousin, and the cousin has forged—or something. And he—not he! He don't care what happens to the estate. He has only got the one life, he says—and he won't spoil it. And of course it does your women harm! Women are always dull when the men don't court them!'

The table laughed. Lucy, looking down it, caught first the face of Eleanor Burgoyne, and in the distance Manisty's black head and absent smile. The girl's young mind was captured by a sudden ghastly sense of the human realities underlying the gay aspects and talk of the luncheon-table. It seemed to her she still heard that heart-rending voice of Mrs. Burgoyne: 'Oh! I never dreamed it could be the same for him as for me. I didn't ask much.'

She dreaded to let herself think. It seemed to her that Mrs. Burgoyne's suffering must reveal itself to all the world, and the girl had moments of hot shame, as though for herself. To her eyes, the change in aspect and expression, visible through all the elegance and care of dress, was already terrible.

Oh! why had she come to Rome? What had changed the world so? Some wounded writhing thing seemed to be struggling in her own breast—while she was holding it down, trying to thrust it out of sight and hearing.

She had written to Uncle Ben, and to the Porters. To-morrow she must break it to Aunt Pattie that she could not go to Vallombrosa, and must hurry back to England. The girl's pure conscience was tortured already by the thought of the excuses she would have to invent. And not a word, till Mr. Manisty was safely started on his way to that function at the Vatican which he was already grumbling over, which he would certainly shirk if he could. But, thank Heaven, it was not possible for him to shirk it.

Again her eyes crossed those of Manisty. He was now discussing the strength of parties in the recent Roman municipal elections with the American Monsignore, talking with all his usual vehemence. Nevertheless, through it all, it seemed to her, that she was watched, that in some continuous and subtle way he held her in sight.

How cold and ungrateful he must have thought her the night before! To-day, at breakfast, and in the train, he had hardly spoken to her.

Yet—mysteriously—Lucy felt herself threatened, hard pressed. Alice Manisty's talk in that wild night haunted her ear. Her hand, cold and tremulous, shook on her knee. Even the voice of the Ambassador startled her.

After luncheon the Ambassador's guests fell into groups on the large shady lawn of the Embassy garden.

The Ambassador introduced Lucy to the blue-eyed Lombard, Fioravanti, while he, pricked with a rueful sense of duty, devoted himself for a time to the wife of the English Admiral who had been Lady Mary's neighbour at luncheon. The Ambassador examined her through his half-closed eyes, as he meekly offered to escort her indoors to see his pictures. She was an elegant and fashionable woman with very white and regular false teeth. Her looks were conventional and mild. In reality the Ambassador knew her to be a Tartar. He walked languidly beside her; his hands were lightly crossed before him; his white head drooped under the old wideawake that he was accustomed to wear in the garden.

Meanwhile the gallant and be-whiskered Admiral would have liked to secure Manisty's attention. To get hold of a politician, or something near a politician, and explain to them a new method of fusing metals in which he believed, represented for him the main object of all social functions.

But Manisty peremptorily shook him off. Eleanor, the American Monsignore, and Reggie Brooklyn were strolling near. He retreated upon them. Eleanor addressed some question to him, but he scarcely answered her. He seemed to be in a brown study, and walked on beside her in silence.

Reggie fell back a few paces, and watched them.

'What a bear he can be when he chooses!' the boy said to himself indignantly. 'And how depressed Eleanor looks! Some fresh worry I suppose—and all his fault. Now look at that!'

For another group—Lucy, her new acquaintance the Count, and Madame Variani—had crossed the path of the first. And Manisty had left Eleanor's side to approach Miss Foster. All trace of abstraction was gone. He looked ill at ease, and yet excited; his eyes were fixed upon the girl. He stooped towards her, speaking in a low voice.

'There's something up'—thought Brooklyn. 'And if that girl's any hand in it she ought to be cut! I thought she was a nice girl.'

His blue eyes stared fiercely at the little scene. Since the day at Nemi, the boy had understood half at least of the situation. He had perceived then that Eleanor was miserably unhappy. No doubt Manisty was disappointing and tormenting her. What else could she expect?

But really—that she should be forsaken and neglected for this chit of a girl—this interloping American—it was too much! Reggie's wrath glowed within him.

Meanwhile Manisty addressed Lucy.

'I have something I very much wish to say to you. There is a seat by the fountain, quite in shade. Will you try it?'

She glanced hurriedly at her companions.

'Thank you—I think we were going to look at the rose-walk.'

Manisty gave an angry laugh, said something inaudible, and walked impetuously away; only to be captured however by the Danish Professor, Doctor Jensen, who took no account of bad manners in an Englishman, holding them as natural as daylight. The flaxen-haired savant therefore was soon happily engaged in pouring out upon his impatient companion the whole of the latest Boletino of the Accademia.

Meanwhile Lucy, seeing nothing, it is to be feared, of the beauty of the Embassy garden, followed her two companions and soon found herself sitting with them on a stone seat beneath a spreading ilex. In front was a tangled mass of roses; beyond, an old bit of wall with Roman foundations; and in the hot blue sky above the wall, between two black cypresses, a slender brown Campanile—furthest of all a glimpse of Sabine mountains. The air was heavy with the scent of the roses, with the heat that announced the coming June, with that indefinable meaning and magic, which is Rome.

Lucy drooped and was silent. The young Count Fioravanti however was not the person either to divine oppression in another or to feel it for himself. He sat with his hat on the back of his head, smoking and twisting his cane, displaying to the fullest advantage those china-blue eyes, under the blackest of curls, which made him so popular in Rome. His irregular and most animated face was full of talent and wilfulness. He liked Madame Variani, and thought the American girl handsome. But it mattered very little to him with whom he talked; he could have chattered to a tree-stump. He was over-flowing with the mere interest and jollity of life.

'Have you known Mr. Manisty long?' he asked of Lucy, while his gay look followed the Professor and his captive.

'I have been staying with them for six weeks at Marinata.'

'What—to finish the book?' he said, laughing.

'Mr. Manisty hoped to finish it.'

The Count laughed again, more loudly and good-humouredly, and shook his head.

'Oh! he won't finish it. It's a folly! And I know, for I made him read some of it to me and my sister. No; it is a strange case—is Manisty's. Most Englishmen have two sides to their brain—while we Latins have only one. But Manisty is like a Latin—he has only one. He takes a whim, and then he must cut and carve the world to it. But the world is tough—et ca ne marche pas! We can't go to ruin to please him. Italy is not falling to pieces—not at all. This war has been a horror—but we shall get through. And there will be no revolution. The people in the streets won't cheer the King and Queen for a little bit—but next year, you will see, the House of Savoy will be there all the same. And he thinks that our priests will destroy us. Nothing of the sort. We can manage our priests!'

Madame Variani made a gesture of dissent. Her heavy, handsome face was turned upon him rather sleepily, as though the heat oppressed her. But her slight frown betrayed, to anyone who knew her, alert attention.

'We can, I say!' cried the Count, striking his knee. 'Besides, the battle is not ranged as Manisty sees it. There are priests, and priests. Up in my part of the world the older priests are all right. We landowners who go with the monarchy can get on with them perfectly. Our old Bishop is a dear: but it is the young priests, fresh from the seminaries—I grant you, they're a nuisance! They swarm over us like locusts, ready for any bit of mischief against the Government. But the Government will win!—Italy will win! Manisty first of all takes the thing too tragically. He doesn't see the farce in it. We do. We Italians understand each other. Why, the Vatican raves and scolds—and all the while, as the Prefect of Police told me only the other day, there is a whole code of signals ready between the police headquarters and a certain window of the Vatican; so that directly they want help against the populace they can call us in. And after that function the other day—where I saw you, Mademoiselle'—he bowed to Lucy—'one of the first things the Vatican did was to send their thanks to the Government for having protected and policed them so well. No; Manisty is in the clouds.' He laughed good-humouredly. 'We are half acting all the time. The Clericals must have their politics, like other people—only they call it religion.'

'But your poor starved peasants—and your corruption—and your war?' said Lucy.

She spoke with energy, frowning a little as though something had nettled her. 'She is like a beautiful nun,' thought the young man, looking with admiration at the austere yet charming face.

'Oh! we shall pull through,' he said, coolly. 'The war was an abomination—a misery. But we shall learn from it. It will no more ruin us than a winter storm can ruin the seed in the ground. Manisty is like all the other clever foreigners who write dirges about us—they don't feel the life-blood pulsing through the veins as we landowners do.' He flung out his clasped hand in a dramatic gesture. 'Come and live with us for a summer on one of our big farms near Mantua—and you shall see. My land brings me just double what it brought my father!—and our contadini are twice as well off. There! that's in our starving Italy—in the north of course, mind you!'

He threw himself back, smoking furiously.

'Optimist!' said a woman's voice.

They looked round to see the Marchesa Fazzoleni upon them. She stood smiling, cigarette in hand, a tall woman, still young—though she was the mother of five robust children. Her closely-fitting black dress somehow resembled a riding-habit; her grey gauntletted gloves drawn to the elbow, her Amazon's hat with its plume, the alertness and grace of the whole attitude, the brilliancy of her clear black eye—all these carried with them the same suggestions of open-air life, of health of body and mind—of a joyous, noble, and powerful personality.

'Look well at her,' the Ambassador had said to Lucy as they stepped into the garden after luncheon. 'She is one of the mothers of the new Italy. She is doing things here—things for the future—that in England it would take twenty women to do. She has all the practical sense of the north; and all the subtlety of the south. She is one of the people who make me feel that Italy and England have somehow mysterious affinities that will work themselves out in history. It seems to me that I could understand all her thoughts—and she mine—if it were worth her while. She is a modern of the moderns; and yet there is in her some of the oldest stuff in the world. She belongs, it is true, to a nation in the making—but that nation, in its earlier forms, has already carried the whole weight of European history!'

And Lucy, looking up to the warm, kind face, felt vaguely comforted and calmed by its mere presence. She made room for the Marchesa beside her.

But the Marchesa declared that she must go home and drag one of her boys, who was studying for an examination, out for exercise. 'Oh! these examinations—they are horrors!' she said, throwing up her hands. 'No—these poor boys!—and they have no games like the English boys. But you were speaking about the war—about our poor Italy?'

She paused. She laid her hand on Lucy's shoulder and looked down into the girl's face. Her eyes became for a moment veiled and misty, as though ghosts passed before them—the grisly calamities and slaughters of the war. Then they cleared and sparkled.

'I tell you, Mademoiselle,' she said slowly, in her difficult picturesque English, 'that what Italy has done in forty years is colossal!—not to be believed! You have taken a hundred years—you!—to make a nation, and you have had a big civil war. Forty years—not quite!—since Cavour died. And all that time Italy has been like that cauldron—you remember?—into which they threw the members of that old man who was to become young. There has been a bubbling, and a fermenting! And the scum has come up—and up. And it comes up still—and the brewing goes on. But in the end the young strong nation will step forth. Now Mr. Manisty—oh! I like Mr. Manisty very well!—but he sees only the ugly gases and the tumult of the cauldron. He has no idea—'

'Oh! Manisty,' said the young Count, flinging away his cigarette; 'he is a poseur of course. His Italian friends don't mind. He has his English fish to fry. Sans cela—!'

He bent forward, staring at Lucy in a boyish absent-mindedness which was no discourtesy, while his hat slipped further down the back of his curly head. His attitude was all careless good-humour; yet one might have felt a touch of southern passion not far off.

'No; his Italian friends don't mind,' said Madame Variani. 'But his English friends should look after him. Everybody should be angry wid som-thin—it is good for the character; but Mr. Manisty is angry wid too many things. That is stupid—that is a waste of time.'

'His book is a blunder,' said Fioravanti with decision. 'By the time it is out, it will look absurd. He says we have become atheists, because we don't let the priests have it all their own way. Bah! we understand these gentry better than he does. Why! my father was all for the advance on Rome—he was a member of the first Government after 1870—he wouldn't give way to the Clericals an inch in what he thought was for the good of the country. But he was the most religious man I ever knew. He never missed any of the old observances in which he had been brought up. He taught us the same. Every Sunday after Mass he read the Gospel for the day to us in Italian, and explained it. And when he was dying he sent for his old parish priest—who used to denounce him from the pulpit and loved him all the same! "And don't make any secret of it!" he said to me. "Bring him in openly—let all the world see. Non crubesco evangelium!"'

The young man stopped—reddened and a little abashed by his own eloquence.

But Madame Variani murmured—still with the same aspect of a shrewd and sleepy cat basking in the sun—

'It is the same with all you Anglo-Saxons. The North will never understand the South—never! You can't understand our a peu pres. You think Catholicism is a tyranny—and we must either let the priests oppress us, or throw everything overboard. But it is nothing of the kind. We take what we want of it, and leave the rest. But you!—if you come over to us, that is another matter! You have to swallow it all. You must begin even with Adam and Eve!'

'Ah! but what I can't understand,' said Fioravanti, 'is how Mrs. Burgoyne allowed it. She ought to have given the book another direction—and she could. She is an extremely clever woman! She knows that caricature is not argument.'

'But what has happened to Mrs. Burgoyne?' said the Marchesa to Lucy, throwing up her hands, 'Such a change! I was so distressed—'

'You think she looks ill?' said Lucy quickly.

Her troubled eyes sought those kind ones looking down upon her almost in appeal. Instinctively the younger woman, far from home and conscious of a hidden agony of feeling, threw herself upon the exquisite maternity that breathed from the elder. 'Oh! if I could tell you!—if you could advise me!' was the girl's unspoken cry.

'She looks terribly ill—to me,' said the Marchesa, gravely. 'And the winter had done her so much good. We all loved her here. It is deplorable. Perhaps the hill climate has been too cold for her, Mademoiselle?'

* * * * *

Lucy walked hurriedly back to the lawn to rejoin her companions. The flood of misery within made movement the only relief. Some instinct of her own came to the aid of the Marchesa's words, helped them to sting all the more deeply. She felt herself a kind of murderer.

Suddenly as she issued blindly from the tangle of the rose-garden she came upon Eleanor Burgoyne talking gaily, surrounded by a little knot of people, mostly older men, who had found her to-day, as always, one of the most charming and distinguished of companions.

Lucy approached her impetuously.

Oh! how white and stricken an aspect—through what a dark eclipse of pain the eyes looked out!

'Ought we not to be going?' Lucy whispered in her ear. 'I am sure you are tired.'

Eleanor rose. She took the girl's hand in a clinging grasp, while she turned smiling to her neighbour the Dane:

'We must be moving to the Villa Borghese—some friends will be meeting us there. Our train does not go for a long, long while.'

'Does any Roman train ever go?' said Doctor Jensen, stroking his straw-coloured beard. 'But why leave us, Madame? Is not one garden as good as another? What spell can we invent to chain you here?'

He bowed low, smiling fatuously, with his hand on his heart. He was one of the most learned men in the world. But about that he cared nothing. The one reputation he desired was that of a 'sad dog'—a terrible man with the ladies. That was the paradox of his existence.

Eleanor laughed mechanically; then she turned to Lucy.

'Come!' she said in the girl's ear, and as they walked away she half closed her eyes against the sun, and Lucy thought she heard a gasp of fatigue. But she spoke lightly.

'Dear, foolish, old man! he was telling me how he had gone back to the Hermitage Library at St. Petersburg the other day to read, after thirty years. And there in a book that had not been taken down since he had used it last he found a leaf of paper and some pencil words scribbled on it by him when he was a youth—"my own darling." "And if I only knew now vich darling!" he said, looking at me and slapping his knee. "Vich darling"!' Eleanor repeated, laughing extravagantly. Then suddenly she wavered. Lucy instinctively caught her by the arm, and Eleanor lent heavily upon her.