r hostess to the door
in the strength of it, tenderly with a kiss but not less hotly, and with
full meaning. Such impulses had stood her instead of virtue on other
occasions; she felt a certain virtue as of superior generosity and
self-sacrifice in her proceedings now.

As for Lucy, still much confused and scarcely recognising the full
meaning of the Contessa's warmth, she made her way to her own room in a
haze of disturbed and uneasy feeling. Somehow--she could not tell
how--she felt herself in the wrong. What was it she had done? What was
it she had left undone? To further the scheme by which young Montjoie
was to be caught and trapped and made the means of fortune and endowment
to Bice was not possible. In such cases it is usually of the possible
victim, the man against whom such plots are formed, that the bystander
thinks; but Lucy thought of young Montjoie only with an instinctive
dislike, which would have been contempt in a less calm and tolerant
mind. That Bice, with all her gifts, a creature so full of life and
sweetness and strength, should be handed over to this trifling
commonplace lad, was in itself terrible to think of. Lucy did not think
of the girl's beauty, or of that newly-developed gift of song which had
taken her by surprise, but only and simply of herself, the warm-hearted
and smiling girl, the creature full of fun and frolic whom she had
learned to be fond of, first, for the sake of little Tom, and then for
her own. Little Tom's friend, his playmate, who had found him out in his
infant weakness and made his life so much brighter! And then Lucy asked
herself what the Contessa could mean, what it was that made her own
interference a sort of impertinence, why her protests had been received
with so little of the usual caressing deference? Thoughts go fast, and
Lucy had not yet reached the door of her own room, when it flashed upon
her what it was. She put down her candle on a table in the corridor, and
stood still to realise it. This gallery at the head of the great
staircase was dimly lighted, and the hall below threw up a glimmer,
reflected in the oaken balusters and doors of the closed rooms, and
dying away in the half-lit gloom above. There were sounds below far off
that betrayed the assembly still undispersed in the smoking-room, and
some fainter still, above, of the ladies who had retired to their rooms,
but were still discussing the strange events of the evening. In the
centre of this partial dar