want to; but yet I don't
like."

"Why?"

"You will be so angry; no, not that, perhaps, but you will be shocked,
and yet I could not help it."

"Help what? Do you know, Lucia, that you are really trying me now?"

"Oh, mamma, no! I am not worth caring so much about."

"Have you and Maurice quarrelled?"

"Maurice! No, indeed. He is the best friend anybody ever had."

"What is it, then?"

"Mamma, do you remember what happened that first night at Cacouna?"

"What first night?" Mrs. Costello pressed her hand upon her heart, which
began to beat painfully.

"The night when you told me about my father."

"Yes; I remember. Go on."

"And the next day?"

"Yes. Don't tell me that you still regret it."

"Mamma, I have seen him again."

"To-day?"

"To-day. At the chapel of St. Ferdinand."

"Did he know you? Did you speak to him?"

"No. He did not see us. He was thinking nothing of me."

"He ought not to think of you."

"Nor I of him. He is married."

"I knew that he either was, or was about to be."

"You have heard of him, then, since?" Lucia raised her head sharply, and
looked at her mother.

"Mrs. Bellairs told me. They had heard it indirectly."

"If you had only told me!" Her head sank lower than before.

"My darling, I may have been mistaken. I have been so, many times; but I
wished to avoid mentioning him to you. I hoped you were forgetting."

"Never; never for an hour," she said, half to herself. "No, mamma, for I
thought he had not forgotten."

"But you sent him away yourself, my child. Remember, you would not even
let me see him. He could not have supposed that you meant your answer to
be anything but decisive."

"I did mean it to be decisive; but he refused to take it so. He said,
'Perhaps in a year;' and it is not a year yet."

Mrs. Costello listened in utter surprise. Lucia had much to say now.
Broken words and sentences, which showed, by degrees, how her mind, as
it recovered from the shock of other troubles, had gone back to dwell
upon the hope of Percy's return, and which explained more fully why she
had been so utterly blind to the schemes which were formed around her.
In one point only she failed. She did not, with all her own faith in it,
convey to her mother the impression of Percy's real earnestness in their
last interview. That he had really loved her, she still believed; but
she did not at all understand his shallow and easily-influenced
character. Mrs. Costello, on the othe