f astonishment that she
drew away from him, standing as far off as the limited space permitted
and avoiding his eye.

"I don't understand it," he said; "there is something underneath; either
he has been more ill than you will let me know, or--there is something
else----"

She gave him no answering look, made no wondering exclamation what could
there be else? as he had hoped; but replied hurriedly, as she had done
before, "I want to stay with him. I must stay with him for to-night----"

It was with the most extraordinary sense of some change, which he could
not fathom or divine, that Sir Tom consented at last to leave his wife
in the child's room and go to his own. What did it mean? What had
happened to him, or was about to happen? He could not explain to himself
the aspect of the slight little youthful figure in her airy white dress,
with the diamonds still at her throat, careless of the hour and time,
standing there in the middle of the night, shrinking away from him,
forlorn and wakeful with her scared eyes. At this hour on ordinary
occasions Lucy was fast asleep. When she came to see her boy, if society
had kept her up late, it was in the ease of a dressing-gown, not with
any cold glitter of ornaments. And to see her shrink and draw herself
away in that strange repugnance from his touch and shadow confounded
him. He was not angry, as he might have been in another case, but
pitiful to the bottom of his heart. What could have come to Lucy? Half
a dozen times he turned back on his way to his room. What meaning could
she have in it? What could have happened to her? Her manifest shrinking
from him had terrified him, and filled his mind with confusion. But
controversy of any kind in the child's room at the risk of waking him in
the middle of the night was impossible, and no doubt, he tried to say to
himself, it must be some panic she had taken, some sudden alarm for the
child, justified by reasons which she did not like to explain to him
till the morning light restored her confidence. Women were so, he had
often heard: and the women he had known in his youth had certainly been
so--unreasoning creatures, subject to their imagination, taking fright
when no occasion for fright was, incapable of explaining. Lucy had never
been like this; but yet Lucy, though sensible, was a woman too, and if
it is not permitted to a woman to take an unreasoning panic about her
only child, she must be hardly judged indeed. Sir Tom was not a h