en had he wished, but Lucia's eyes were smiling
and her face was rosy with the cold and the swift motion. She was
muffled in a heavy black cloak, but her expression was happy.

The carriage passed so swiftly that she did not see Prescott standing on
the sidewalk. He gazed after the disappearing party and others did
likewise, for carriages were becoming too scarce in Richmond not to be
noticed. Some one spoke lightly, coupling the names of James Sefton and
Lucia Catherwood. Prescott turned fiercely upon him and bade him beware
how he repeated such remarks. The man did not reply, startled by such
heat, and Prescott walked on, striving to keep down the anger and grief
that were rising within him.

He concluded that he need not hurry now, because if he went at once to
the little house in the cross street she would not be there; and he came
to an angry conclusion that while he had been upon an errand of hardship
and danger she had been enjoying all the excitement of life in the
capital and with a powerful friend at court. He had always felt a sense
of proprietorship in her and now it was rudely shocked. He forgot that
if he had saved her she had saved him. It never occurred to him in his
glowing youth that she had an entire right to love and marry James
Sefton if fate so decreed.

He walked back and forth so angrily and so thoroughly wrapped in his own
thoughts that he noticed nobody, though many noticed him and wondered at
the young man with the pale face and the hot eyes.

It was twilight before he resumed his journey to the little house. The
gray November day was thickening into the chill gloom of a winter night
when he knocked at the well-remembered door. The shutters were closed,
but some bars of ruddy light shone through them and fell across the
brown earth. He was not coming now in secrecy as of old, but he had come
with a better heart then.

It was Lucia herself who opened the door--Lucia, with a softer face than
in the earlier time, but with a royal dignity that he had never seen in
any other woman, and he had seen women who were royal by birth. She was
clad in some soft gray stuff and her hair was drawn high upon her head,
a crown of burnished black, gleaming with tints of red, like flame,
where the firelight behind her flickered and fell upon it.

The twilight was heavy without and she did not see at once who was
standing at the door. She put up her hands to shade her eyes, but when
she beheld Prescott a lit