ry unwilling
you were to be kept."

"Do you mind telling me what made you want to keep me? You didn't know
me in the least, you know."

"I wanted to keep you _because_ you didn't want to stay. I knew then
that I could trust you. But I confess that most people might not have
seen it in that way."

"Well, I can't let you take these sonnets on trust. For this time,
your principle doesn't apply, you see. You can't say you're accepting
this dedication because I don't want to give it to you." Though he
laughed he rose and backed towards the door, suddenly anxious to be
gone.

"Isn't it enough that I want to accept it?"

He shook his head, still backing, and at the door he paused to speak.
"You've accepted nothing--as yet."

"Of course," she said to herself, "it would have been wiser to have
read them first. But I can trust him."

But as she was about to read them a knock, a familiar knock at the
door interrupted her. "Kitty!"

She laid the manuscript hastily aside, well out of Kitty's roving
sight. She had noticed how his hands had trembled as he brought it;
she did not notice that her own shook a little in thus putting it away
from her.

Kitty Palliser, up in town for a week, had come less on her own
account than as an impetuous ambassador from the now frantic Edith.
She too was prepared to move heaven and earth, if only she could
snatch her Lucy from Tavistock Place. But her anxiety was not wholly
on Lucia's account, as presently appeared.

"How can you stand it for a minute?" said she.

"I'm standing it very well indeed."

"But what on earth do you find to do all day long, when," said Kitty
severely, "you're _not_ talking to young Rickman?"

"All day long I go out, or lie down and read, or talk to Sophie."

"And in the evenings?"

"In the evenings sometimes I make an old man happy by playing."

"And I expect you're making a young man unhappy by playing, too--a
very dangerous game."

"Kitty, that young man is perfectly happy. He's going to be married."

"All the worse. Then you'll make a young woman unhappy as well. This
little game would be dangerous enough with a man of your own set. It
isn't fair to play it with him, Lucy, when you know the rules and he
doesn't."

"I assure you, Kitty, he knows them as well as you or I do; better."

"I doubt it." Kitty's eyes roamed round the room (they had not lost
their alert and hungry look) and they took in the situation at a
glance. That move in the game