her, don't be
afraid--speak out."

"I'm not afraid of speaking to her--I'm afraid--"

"Of what?"

"Simply of _seeing_ her."

"You mean you are afraid of seeing her changed?" She understood him;
for it was what she herself had been afraid of.

"Horribly afraid."

"My dear Mr. Rickman, people in great trouble don't change to other
people. They only change to themselves."

He raised his hat and turned from her without speaking.

Kitty felt remorseful as she looked after him, for she had not
scrupled to sacrifice him to her idea. Kitty's idea was to get as high
a price as possible out of Rickman Senior, and Rickman Junior was the
only man who could get it. If the object was to shunt Rickman Senior
altogether, Rickman Junior could be depended on for that, too. She
could see that under the influence of his unhappy passion he had
absolutely detached himself from his father's interests and his own.
Kitty was profoundly sorry for him, and if she had yielded to her
impulses of mercy and pity she would have kept him from Lucia as she
would have kept a poor insane moth from the candle. It might be
necessary to turn the moth out of doors in order to save it,
and--well, she would have turned him out of doors, too, in sheer mercy
and pity. But Kitty had a practical mind, and that practical mind
perceived the services that might be rendered by a person so
suicidally inspired. If she had read him aright, fire and water were
nothing to what Mr. Rickman was prepared to go through for Lucia.
Therefore she sent him to Lucia.

But it was on his own account, for his healing and his consolation,
that she advised him to make a clean breast of it.

CHAPTER XXIX

Lucia was in the library and alone. Everything was as she had left it
that morning two weeks ago; she saw the same solid floor and ceiling,
the same faded Persian rugs, the same yellow pale busts on their tall
pedestals, the same bookshelves, wing after wing and row upon row. The
south lattice still showed through its leaded lozenge panes the bright
green lawn, the beech tree and the blue sky; the west lattice held the
valley and the hills, with the river, a sinuous band of silver between
the emerald and the amethyst. These things were so woven with the
tissue of her mind that the sense of them had remained with her during
the terrible seven days at Cannes. But now they appeared to her
stripped of their air of permanence and familiarity. They were blurred
and insu