very solid portion of
her income. Then her dreaming self awoke to the memory of something
unachieved, an obligation rashly incurred, a promise that could never
be fulfilled.

Yes. She would see Mr. Rickman.

CHAPTER XXX

Lucia had risen and was standing in the embrasure of the south window.
She had her back to the door, so that she could not see him as he came
in.

He wondered how on earth he was going to get over the space between
the window and the door. A sudden wave of weakness went through his
body; he had horrible sensations of sinking at the middle and of
giving way altogether at the knees. He had been afraid of seeing her
suffer; now he knew that what he was really afraid of was her fear of
seeing him. He expected to see her face set in abhorrence of his
sympathy, her body shrink in anticipation of a touch on her pain.

Lucia spared him all the embarrassments of that approach As if she had
divined his feeling, she turned, she came forward to meet him, she
held out her hand and smiled as she would have smiled if nothing had
happened.

His hand trembled visibly as it dropped from hers. He hid it in his
breast pocket, where it pretended to be looking for things.

"Miss Palliser said she thought you would see me--"

"Yes, I wanted to see you; I would have sent for you if you had not
come. Sit down, please."

She sat down herself, in her old place at the writing table.

He took the chair beside her and leaned back, resting his arm on the
table. She turned so as to face him.

She was not so changed but that his hungry and unhappy eyes could rest
on her, appeased and comforted. And yet she _was_ changed, too. Her
girlhood, with all its innocence of suffering, had died in her. But
the touch of that death was masterly, it had redeemed her beauty from
the vagueness of its youth. Grief, that drags or sharpens or deforms
the faces of older women, had given to hers the precision that it
lacked. There was a faint sallow tinge in the whiteness of her skin,
and her eyelids drooped as if she were tired to the point of
exhaustion. He noticed, too, the pathetic tension that restrained the
quivering of her mouth. It was the upper lip that trembled.

"You have been ill?" she said.

And as he answered that, "Oh, it was nothing," he was aware for the
first time how very much it had been. She too was aware of it.

She expressed her concern; she hoped that they had looked after him
well at the hotel.

Decid