. There were a thousand
things I wanted to explain and set right; and I asked Horace for an
opportunity and he never gave it me. He can't blame me if I take it
now."

"If Horace did all these things, he did them for the best possible
reasons. He knows rather more of this young man than you do, or could
have any idea of. I don't know what he is now, but he was, at one
time, thoroughly disreputable."

"Whatever _did_ he do?"

"Do? He did everything. He drank; he ran after the worst sort of
women--he mixes now with the lowest class of journalists in town; he
lived for months, Horace says, with a horrid little actress in the
next house to this."

Lucia's face quivered like a pale flame.

"I don't believe it. I don't believe it for a moment."

"It's absurd to say you don't believe what everybody knows, and what
anybody here can tell you."

"I never heard a word against him here. Ask Sophie She's known him for
five years. Besides, _I_ know him. That's enough."

"Lucy, when you once get hold of an idea you're blind to everything
outside it."

"I take after my family in that. But no, I'm not blind. He may have
gone wrong once, at some time--but never, no, I'm sure of it, since I
knew him."

"Still, when a man has once lived that sort of life, the coarseness
must remain."

"Coarseness? There isn't any refinement, any gentleness he isn't
capable of. He's fine through and through. Stay and meet him, Edith,
and see for yourself."

"I _have_ met him."

"And yet you can't see?"

"I've seen all I want to see."

"Don't, Edith--"

There was a sound of feet running swiftly up the stair; the door of
the adjoining room opened and shut, and a man's voice was heard
singing. These sounds conveyed to Edith a frightful sense of the
nearness and intimacy of the young man, and of the horror of Lucia's
position. As she listened she held her cousin by her two hands in a
dumb agony of entreaty.

"Horace is coming back," she whispered.

"No, Edith, it's no good. I'm going to stay till Kitty takes me."

Edith wondered whether, after all, Lucia was so very fastidious and
refined; whether, indeed, in taking after her family, she did not take
after the least estimable of the Hardens. There was a wild strain in
them; their women had been known to do queer things, unaccountable,
disagreeable, disreputable things; and Lucia was Sir Frederick's
daughter. Somehow that young voice singing in the next room rubbed
this impression int