Whatever it was, she had determined to bear it as far as possible alone.  She was almost sorry that she had not refused Kitty’s offer to stay with her; she suffered so from Kitty’s inability to conceal the truth.  Not that Kitty said anything; it was her unnatural silence that was so terrible.  With that extraordinary acuteness that had come upon her now Lucia saw, in the involuntary hardening and flushing of Kitty’s face, that in Kitty’s mind her father was not only suspected, but condemned.  She was afraid lest she herself should in some moments of weakness betray him; and Kitty’s strange unusual tenderness inspired her with terror.  She shrank even from old Mrs. Palliser, Kitty’s mother, with her soft trembling face and clinging hands.  Their sympathy was poignant and unnerving, and she needed all her strength for the things she had to do.

She did them, too.  While one half of her brain had slackened its grip of the world, the other half retained the most perfect grasp of certain necessary details.  She spent the morning with her father’s solicitor, while he explained to her the first principles of finance, and the inner meaning of mortgages and bills of sale.  She understood clearly that the things which would naturally have come to her on her father’s death belonged in a certain sense to Mr. Richard Pilkington of Shaftesbury Avenue.  Mr. Schofield, poor man, had approached this branch of his subject gently and gingerly, with every delicacy of phrasing that his fancy could suggest.  He leaned back in his chair and looked at her through half-closed eyes, respectfully veiling the shrewdness of his gaze.  Lucia had at first displayed so little interest and intelligence that he felt himself compelled to a broader and simpler statement of the facts.  With the exception of her own personal possessions, nothing in Court House remained to her, nothing, not a book, not a solitary piece of drawing-room furniture.  Mr. Pilkington’s bill of sale was, he grieved to say, inclusive of everything, from the Harden library and the great gallery of portraits, to the glass and china in the pantry, and the blankets on the beds.  “Not even,” he had said, “that little paper weight that you have in your hand, Miss Harden.”  And Lucia had examined the paper weight as if she saw it for the first time; she put it down and smiled.  It struck her as incomprehensible, ludicrous almost that any one could spend so much passion and solemnity on things so unimportant, so irrelevant; she was not in the least surprised to hear that they did not belong to her; the inconceivable thing was that they ever had belonged to her.

And as the solicitor looked at her the corners of his mouth twitched with a little spasm of pity; his eyes lost their veiled shrewdness, and when she smiled they stared in frankest fright.  For a moment he supposed that the shock of his announcement had turned her brain.  It never occurred to that astute intelligence that she was smiling at his own simplicity.