s, for having found what he had taken such pains
to hide from her. It seemed somehow cruel and unfair. She did not tax
him with hypocrisy, because he had so long contrived to keep himself
clean in her sight; she was grateful to him for having spared her this
knowledge. But whether she forgave him or not--no, looking back on it
at this moment she could not tell. Lucia was too young for the great
forgiveness that comes of understanding.

She walked up and down the library, staring at the books, at the
tables piled with papers; she stood at each window in turn and looked
out on the garden, the valley and the hills, Harmouth Gap, and the
long brown rampart line of Muttersmoor. It was simply impossible for
her to realize their once intimate relation to her life.

She was unaware that her mood was chiefly the result of physical and
mental exhaustion. It seemed to her rather that she had acquired
strange powers of insight, that she had pierced to the back of the
illusion. Never had she possessed so luminous a sense of the unreality
of things. She found this view consoling, for it is the desire of
unhappy youth that there shall be no permanence where there is pain.

On this unreal and insubstantial background faces came and went all
day long, faces solemn and obsequious, faces glazed and feverish with
emotion; Robert's face with red-rimmed eyes hiding Robert's
unutterable sympathy under a thin mask of fright; Kitty's face with an
entirely new expression on it; and her own face met them with an
incomprehensible and tearless calm. For she was not even sure of that,
not even sure of her own sorrow. She had had to do with sorrow once
before, when her grandfather died, and she thought she would be sure
to know it when it came to her again; but she had no name for this new
feeling, and at times it seemed to her that it was not sorrow at all.

Whatever it was, she had determined to bear it as far as possible
alone. She was almost sorry that she had not refused Kitty's offer to
stay with her; she suffered so from Kitty's inability to conceal the
truth. Not that Kitty said anything; it was her unnatural silence that
was so terrible. With that extraordinary acuteness that had come upon
her now Lucia saw, in the involuntary hardening and flushing of
Kitty's face, that in Kitty's mind her father was not only suspected,
but condemned. She was afraid lest she herself should in some moments
of weakness betray him; and Kitty's strange unusu