They rose, and walked together, forgetful of the eagerly observant group.

“Could she see me to-day—­this evening?  I’m going to-morrow.”

“Yes, I’ll tell her you’re coming.  When you do see her, don’t be afraid—­speak out.”

“I’m not afraid of speaking to her—­I’m afraid—­”

“Of what?”

“Simply of seeing her.”

“You mean you are afraid of seeing her changed?” She understood him; for it was what she herself had been afraid of.

“Horribly afraid.”

“My dear Mr. Rickman, people in great trouble don’t change to other people.  They only change to themselves.”

He raised his hat and turned from her without speaking.

Kitty felt remorseful as she looked after him, for she had not scrupled to sacrifice him to her idea.  Kitty’s idea was to get as high a price as possible out of Rickman Senior, and Rickman Junior was the only man who could get it.  If the object was to shunt Rickman Senior altogether, Rickman Junior could be depended on for that, too.  She could see that under the influence of his unhappy passion he had absolutely detached himself from his father’s interests and his own.  Kitty was profoundly sorry for him, and if she had yielded to her impulses of mercy and pity she would have kept him from Lucia as she would have kept a poor insane moth from the candle.  It might be necessary to turn the moth out of doors in order to save it, and—­well, she would have turned him out of doors, too, in sheer mercy and pity.  But Kitty had a practical mind, and that practical mind perceived the services that might be rendered by a person so suicidally inspired.  If she had read him aright, fire and water were nothing to what Mr. Rickman was prepared to go through for Lucia.  Therefore she sent him to Lucia.

But it was on his own account, for his healing and his consolation, that she advised him to make a clean breast of it.

CHAPTER XXIX

Lucia was in the library and alone.  Everything was as she had left it that morning two weeks ago; she saw the same solid floor and ceiling, the same faded Persian rugs, the same yellow pale busts on their tall pedestals, the same bookshelves, wing after wing and row upon row.  The south lattice still showed through its leaded lozenge panes the bright green lawn, the beech tree and the blue sky; the west lattice held the valley and the hills, with the river, a sinuous band of silver between the emerald and the amethyst.  These things were so woven with the tissue of her mind that the sense of them had remained with her during the terrible seven days at Cannes.  But now they appeared to her stripped of their air of permanence and familiarity.  They were blurred and insubstantial, like things remembered rather than actually seen.  All that subdued and tender loveliness belonged only to her young past, and she had been torn from it so violently, it had been flung so far behind her, that it seemed to her at the moment incredible and impossible.  Life, that had hitherto dealt with her so gently and so graciously, had in the last two weeks turned hideous and brutal.