rule her spirit as to save herself needless suffering.

Thus the very intensity of her sympathy for Bella only reacted in
loathing and horror of herself; and she had begun to try to devise means
for carrying out that avoidance of all most nearly connected with the
dead, which seemed to her an imperative duty, when she was startled by
her mother's voice.

"If it is he," she said--and it seemed that they both shrank from any
plainer expression of their thoughts than these vague phrases--"if it is
he our hardest task is before us. How will you bear, Lucia, to meet
them all again?"

"Mother, I cannot! Surely you do not think of it. How can _we_"--she
shuddered as she spoke--"how can we go again among any innocent people?"

"My child, we _must_. More than that, we must keep our secret, if we
can, still."

"But Bella? Mother, how can I look at her--a widow--and know who I am,
and who has done it?"

"Listen to me, Lucia. My poor child, your burden has been heavy lately;
do not make it heavier than it need be. The crime and the horror are bad
enough, but we have no share in them. No; think of it reasonably. The
wife and child of a criminal, even where there has been daily
association between them, are not condemned, but rather pitied. No mind,
but one cruelly prejudiced, would brand them with his guilt. Do not
punish yourself, then, where others would acquit you. But, indeed, I
need not tell you how our very separation is a safeguard to us--to you
especially. Think of these things; and do not suffer yourself to imagine
that there is a bar between you and Bella just now, when I know you
love her more than ever."

Lucia's head lay upon her mother's knee. Mrs. Costello's touch on the
soft hair, her tone of gentle reproof, and the thoughts her words called
up, brought tears, fast and thick, to her child's eyes. Lucia had shed
few tears in her life. Until lately she had known no cause for them; and
lately they had not come. With dry eyes and throbbing temples she had
gone through the most sorrowful hours; but now the spell seemed broken,
and a sense of calm and relief came with the change. Mrs. Costello went
on,--

"There is another reason why we must appear as we have always done.
Suspicion is not proof. Margery's story, and more, may be true, and yet
it may be that, three months hence, all, as regards ourselves, will be
just as it has been. We must not, through a blind fear of one calamity,
put ourselves in the way of an