him, but she caught his eyes in the pier-glass, looking at her. Lionel smiled.
“I am thinking what a trouble you must find me. You and Decima.”
She did not speak at first. Then she went quite close to him, her earnest, sympathising eyes cast up to his.
“If you please, you need not pretend to make light of it to me,” she whispered. “I don’t like you to think that I do not know all you must feel, and what a blow it is. I think I feel it quite as much as you can do—for your sake, and for Mrs. Verner’s. I lie awake at night, thinking of it: but I do not say so to Decima and Lady Verner. I make light of it to them, as you are making light of it to me.”
“I know, I know!” he uttered, in a tone that would have been a passionate one, but for its wailing despair. “My whole life, for a long while, has been one long scene of acting—to you. I dare not make it otherwise. There’s no remedy for it.”
She had not anticipated the outburst; she had simply wished to express her true feeling of sympathy for their great misfortunes, as she might have expressed it to any other gentleman who had been turned from his home with his wife. She could not bear for Lionel not to know that he had had her deepest, her kindliest, her truest sympathy: and this had nothing to do with any secret feeling she might, or might not, entertain for him. Indeed, but for the unpleasant latent consciousness of that very feeling, Lucy would have made her sympathy more demonstrative. The outbreak seemed to check her; to throw her friendship back upon herself; and she stood irresolute: but she was too single-minded, too full of nature’s truth, to be angry with what had been a genuine outpouring of his inmost heart, drawn from him in a moment of irrepressible sorrow. Lionel let the ornament fall back on the mantel-piece, and turned to her, his manner changing. He took her hands, clasping them in one of his; he laid his other hand lightly on her fair young head, reverently as any old grandfather might have done.
“Lucy!—my dear friend!—you must not mistake me. There are times when some of the bitterness within me is drawn forth, and I say more than I ought: what I never should say, in a calmer moment. I wish I could talk to you; I wish I could give you the full confidence of all my sorrows, as I gave it you on another subject once before. I wish I could draw you to my side, as if you were my sister, or one of my dearest friends, and tell you of the great trouble at my heart. But it cannot be. I thank you, I thank you for your sympathy. I know that you would give me your friendship in all single-heartedness, like Decima might give it me; and it would be to me as a green spot of brightness in life’s arid desert. But the green spot might for me grow too bright, Lucy; and my only plan is to be wise in time, and to forego it.”
“I did but mean to express my sorrow for you and Mrs. Verner,” she timidly answered. “My sense of the calamity which has fallen upon you.”
“Child, I know it: and I dare not say how I feel it; I dare not thank you as I ought. In truth it is a terrible calamity. All its consequences I cannot yet anticipate: but they may be worse than anybody suspects, or than I like to glance at. It is a deep and apparently an irremediable misfortune: I cannot but feel it keenly: and I feel it for my wife more than for myself. Now and then, something like a glimpse of consolation shows itself—that it has not been brought on by any fault of mine; and that, humanly speaking, I have done nothing to deserve it.”
“Mr. Cust had used to tell us, that however dark a misfortune might be, however hopeless even, there was sure to be a way of looking at it, by which we might see that it might have been darker,” observed Lucy. “This would have been darker for you, had it proved to be Frederick Massingbird, instead of John: very sadly darker for Mrs. Verner.”
“Ay; so far I cannot be too thankful,” replied Lionel. The remembrance flashed over him of his wife’s words that day—in her temper—she wished it had been Frederick. It appeared to be a wish that she had already thrown out frequently: not so much that she did wish it, as to annoy him.
“Mr. Cust used to tell us another thing,” resumed Lucy, breaking the silence. “That these apparently hopeless misfortunes sometimes turn out to be great benefits in the end. Who knows but in a short time, through some magic or other, you and Mrs. Verner may not be back at Verner’s Pride? Would not that be happiness?”
“I don’t know about happiness, Lucy; sometimes I feel tired of everything,” he wearily answered. “As if I should like to run away for ever, and be at rest. My life at Verner’s Pride was not a bed of rose-leaves.”
He heard his mother’s voice in the ante-room, and went forward to open the door for her. Lady Verner came in, followed by Jan. Jan was going to dine there; and Jan was actually in orthodox dinner costume. Decima had invited him, and Decima had told him to be sure to dress himself: that she wanted to make a little festival of the evening to welcome Lionel and his wife. So Jan remembered, and appeared in black: but the gloss of the whole was taken off by Jan having his shirt fastened down the front with pins, where the buttons ought to be. Brassy-looking, ugly bent pins, as big as skewers, stuck in horizontally.
“Is that a new fashion coming in, Jan?” asked Lady Verner, pointing with some asperity to the pins.
“It’s to be hoped not,” replied Jan. “It took me five minutes to pin the thing, and there’s one of the pins sticking into my wrist now. It’s a new shirt of mine that they’ve sent home, and they have forgotten the buttons. Miss Deb caught sight of it, when I went in to tell her I was coming here, and ran after me to the gate with a needle and thread, wanting to sew them on.”
“Could you not have fastened it better than that, Jan?” asked Decima, smiling as she looked at the shirt.
