al tenderness
inspired her with terror. She shrank even from old Mrs. Palliser,
Kitty's mother, with her soft trembling face and clinging hands. Their
sympathy was poignant and unnerving, and she needed all her strength
for the things she had to do.

She did them, too. While one half of her brain had slackened its grip
of the world, the other half retained the most perfect grasp of
certain necessary details. She spent the morning with her father's
solicitor, while he explained to her the first principles of finance,
and the inner meaning of mortgages and bills of sale. She understood
clearly that the things which would naturally have come to her on her
father's death belonged in a certain sense to Mr. Richard Pilkington
of Shaftesbury Avenue. Mr. Schofield, poor man, had approached this
branch of his subject gently and gingerly, with every delicacy of
phrasing that his fancy could suggest. He leaned back in his chair and
looked at her through half-closed eyes, respectfully veiling the
shrewdness of his gaze. Lucia had at first displayed so little
interest and intelligence that he felt himself compelled to a broader
and simpler statement of the facts. With the exception of her own
personal possessions, nothing in Court House remained to her, nothing,
not a book, not a solitary piece of drawing-room furniture. Mr.
Pilkington's bill of sale was, he grieved to say, inclusive of
everything, from the Harden library and the great gallery of
portraits, to the glass and china in the pantry, and the blankets on
the beds. "Not even," he had said, "that little paper weight that you
have in your hand, Miss Harden." And Lucia had examined the paper
weight as if she saw it for the first time; she put it down and
smiled. It struck her as incomprehensible, ludicrous almost that any
one could spend so much passion and solemnity on things so
unimportant, so irrelevant; she was not in the least surprised to hear
that they did not belong to her; the inconceivable thing was that they
ever had belonged to her.

And as the solicitor looked at her the corners of his mouth twitched
with a little spasm of pity; his eyes lost their veiled shrewdness,
and when she smiled they stared in frankest fright. For a moment he
supposed that the shock of his announcement had turned her brain. It
never occurred to that astute intelligence that she was smiling at
his own simplicity.

When he had left she returned to the writing-table; she sorted and
arran