sible. After thirteen years, or was it
fourteen?--suddenly--with no warning symptoms, to plunge into such
devotion as never before, when everything had been new, and he only
engaged--! Men were like that when they were engaged. They aren't
certain of one, and leave no chances. But James, even as an engaged
man, had always been certain. He had taken her, and everything else,
for granted. She remembered how her sisters, not only Mabel, but the
critical Agnes (now Mrs. Riddell in the North), had discussed him and
found him too cocksure to be quite gallant. Kissed her? Of course he
had kissed her. Good Heavens. Yes, but not as he had that night at the
Opera. "You darling! You darling!" Now James had called her "my
darling" as often as you please--but never until then "you darling."
There's a world of difference. Anybody can see it.

And then--after the beautiful, the thrilling, the deeply touching
episode--the moment after it--there was the old, indifferent, slightly
bored James with the screwed eye and the disk. Not a hint, not a
ripple, not the remains of a flush. It was the most bewildering, the
most baffling jig-saw of a business she had ever heard of. You would
have said that he was two quite separate people; you might have
said--Mabel would have said at once--that James had had nothing to do
with it.

But she _had_ said so! The discovery stabbed Lucy in the eyes like a
flash of lightning, left her blind and quivering, with a swim of red
before her hurt vision. That was why Mabel had been frightened. And
now Lucy herself was frightened.

Francis Lingen, absurd! Mr. Urquhart? Ah, that was quite another
thing. She grew hot, she grew quite cold, and suddenly she began to
sob. Oh, no, no, not that. A flood of tossing thoughts came rioting
and racing in, flinging crests of foam, like white and beaten water.
She for a time was swept about, a weed in this fury of storm. She was
lost, effortless, at death's threshold. But she awoke herself from the
nightmare, walked herself about, and reason returned. It was nonsense,
unwholesome nonsense. Why, that first time, he was in the library with
James and Francis Lingen, his second visit to the house! Why, when she
was at the Opera he had been at Peltry with the Mabels. And as for
Wycross, he had wired from St. James's in the afternoon, and come on
the next day. Absurd--and thank God for it. And poor Francis Lingen!
She could afford to laugh at that. Francis Lingen was as capable o