d uncared for.
After the first moment he went hastily to the windows, and drew down
the blinds in a kind of tender impatience. He could not bear that
anything in the world, even her father's danger, should discompose the
sweet, good order of the place where Lucy's image dwelt. There was a
chair and her basket of work, and on the little table a book marked
with pencil-marks, such as youthful readers love to make; and by
degrees that breath of Lucy lingering in the silent room overcame its
dreariness, and the painful sense of desertion which had struck him at
first. He hovered about that corner where her usual place was, feeling
in his heart that Lucy in trouble was dearer, if possible, than Lucy
in happiness, and hung over her chair, with a mixture of reverence and
tenderness and yearning, which could never be expressed in words. It
was the divinest phase of love which was in his mind at the moment;
for he was not thinking of himself, but of her, and of how he could
succour and comfort her, and interpose his own true heart and life
between her and all trouble. It was at this moment that Lucy herself
entered the room; she came in softly, and surprised him in the
overflowing of his heart. She held out her hand to him as usual, and
smiled, perhaps less brightly, but that of course arose from the
circumstances of the house; and her voice was very measured and steady
when she spoke, less variable than of old. What was it she said? Mr
Wentworth unconsciously left the neighbourhood of that chair over
which he had been bending, which, to tell the truth, he had leaned his
head upon, lover-like, and perhaps even kissed for her sake, five
minutes before, and grew red and grew pale with a strange revulsion
and tumult of feeling. He could not tell what the difference was, or
what it meant. He only felt in an instant, with a sense of the change
that chilled him to the heart, as if somehow a wall of ice had risen
between them. He could see her through the transparent veil, and hear
her speak, and perceive the smile which cast no warmth of reflection
on him; but in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, everything in
heaven and earth was changed. Lucy herself, to her own consciousness,
trembled and faltered, and felt as if her voice and her looks must
betray an amount of emotion which she would have died rather than
show; but then Lucy had rehearsed this scene before, and knew all she
intended by it; whereas upon the Curate, in his little