yself."

"I shouldn't make much by it," said Kitty.

Lucia closed her eyes, and Kitty went on with the manuscript she was
copying. After a silence of twenty minutes Lucia opened her eyes
again. They rested longingly on Kitty at her work.

"Kitty," she said, "Do you know, I sometimes think it would be better
to sell those books. I can't bear to do it when he gave them to me.
But I do believe I ought to. The worst of it is I should have to ask
him to do it for me."

"Don't do anything in a hurry, dear. Wait and see," said Kitty
cheerfully.

It seemed to Lucia that there was nothing to wait for now. She
wondered why Kitty said that, and whether it meant that they thought
her worse than they liked to say and whether that was why Sir Wilfrid
Spence was coming?

"Kitty," she said again, "I want you to promise me something.
Supposing--it's very unlikely--but supposing after all I were to go
and die--"

"I won't suppose anything of the sort. People don't go and die of
nervous exhaustion. You'll probably do it fifty years hence, but that
is just the reason why I won't have you harrowing my feelings this way
now."

"I know I've had such piles of sympathy for my nervous exhaustion that
it's horrid of me to try and get more for dying, too. I only meant if
I did do it, quite unexpectedly, of something else--you wouldn't tell
him, would you?"

"Well, dear, of course I won't mention it if you wish me not to--but
he'd be sure to see it in the papers."

"Kitty--you know what I mean. He couldn't see _that_ in the papers. He
couldn't see it anywhere unless you told him. And if you did, it might
make him very uncomfortable, you know."

Poor Kitty, trying to be cheerful under the shadow of Sir Wilfrid
Spence, was tortured by this conversation. She had half a mind to say,
"You don't seem to think how uncomfortable you're making _me_." But
she forbore. Any remark of that sort would rouse Lucia to efforts
penitential in their motive, and more painful to bear than this
pitiful outburst, the first in many months of patience and reserve.
She remembered how Lucia had once nursed her through a long illness in
Dresden. It had not been, as Kitty expressed it, "a pretty illness,"
and she had been distinctly irritable in her convalescence; but Lucy
had been all tenderness, had never betrayed impatience by any look or
word.

"I shouldn't mind anything, if only I'd been with him when _he_ was
ill. But perhaps he'd rather I hadn't been t