cover yet."

He raised it carefully, while she stood looking on.

"It is not much broken, after all. I will plant it again; and with
plenty of support and shade, I think it will do."

Lucia flew to bring her spade. She held the tree, while Maurice
carefully arranged its roots and piled the earth about them; the
scattered leaves were picked up from the bed, and a kind of tent made
with matting over the invalid; at last she found time to say,

"But how did you happen to come just at the right moment?"

"I saw you from my window. I noticed that you were very busy for awhile,
and when you stopped working and sat down in that disconsolate attitude,
I guessed some terrible misfortune must have happened. So I came."

Lucia looked at him gravely, a little troubled.

"I never saw anybody like you," she said; "you seem always to know when
one is in a dilemma."

Maurice laughed.

"If all dilemmas were like this, I might easily get up a character for
being a sort of Providence; but come and show me what else there is to
do."

They worked together for an hour, by the end of which, all was restored
nearly to its former neatness. Mrs. Costello came out and found them
busy at the vine. Maurice was on a ladder nailing it up, while Lucia
handed him the nails and strips of cloth, as he wanted them. She felt a
lively pleasure in seeing them thus occupied. Maurice was too dear to
her, for her not to have seen how Lucia's recent and gradual
estrangement had troubled him; for his sake, therefore, as well as for
her own and her child's, she had grieved daily over what she dared not
interfere to prevent,--the breaking up of old habits, and the
intervention between these two of an influence she dreaded. The
experience of her own life had convinced her, rightly or wrongly, that
it was worse than useless for parents to try to control their children's
inclinations in the most important point where inclination ever ought to
be made the rule of conduct. But for years she had hoped that Lucia's
affection for Maurice would grow, unchecked and untroubled, till it
attained that perfection which she thought the beau ideal of married
love; and even now, she held tenaciously to such fragments of her old
hope as still remained. This morning, after a night of the most painful
anxiety and foreboding, her mind naturally caught at the idea that _all_
could not go wrong with her; that she must have exaggerated the change
in Lucia, and that, at least,