But whatever her almost joyous acceptance of the pretty lady promised for the future, it could not be said that, conversationally, Lucia was getting on very fast with Flossie in the present; and Rickman’s abstraction did not make things easier.  Therefore she was a little relieved when Miss Roots joined them, and Rickman, startled into consciousness, got up and left the room.  He feared that lady’s sympathy and shrewdness.  Nothing could be hidden from her clever eyes.

And now, perceiving that the conversation flagged, Miss Roots endeavoured to support it.

“Have you seen Metropolis?” she asked in her tired voice.

Lucia shook her head.  “I don’t know that I want to see it.”

“You’d better not say so before Miss Walker.”

“Oh, never mind me,” said Miss Walker.  “I haven’t been yet.  Is it good?”

“Some people seem to think so.  It depends.”

“Yes; there’s such a difference in the way they put them on the stage, too.”

Miss Roots’ face relaxed, and her fatigued intelligence awoke.

“Who’s on in it?” asked Flossie, happy and unconscious; and the spirit of mischief seized upon Miss Roots.

“I can’t tell you.  I’m not well posted in these things.  But I think you’d better not ask Mr. Rickman to take you to see Metropolis.”

Flossie was mystified, and a little indignant.  If the play was so improper, why had Miss Roots taken for granted that she had seen it?

“That wasn’t at all nice of her, was it?” said Lucia, smiling as Miss Roots went away.  Her look was a healing touch laid on Flossie’s wounded vanity.  “That’s the sort of little trap she used to lay for me.”

“I suppose you mean she was rotting me.  I always know when other people are rotting.  But that’s the worst of her; you never can tell, and she makes you look so ignorant, doesn’t she?”

“She makes me feel ignorant, but that’s another thing.”

“But whatever did she mean just now?”

“Just now she meant that you knew all about Metropolis.”

“Why should I?  Do you know anything about it?”

“Not much; though it is my cousin’s paper.  But as Mr. Rickman writes for it, you see—­”

“Well, how was I to know that?  He’s always writing for something; and he’d never think of coming to me every time.  I never talk shop to him, and he never talks shop to me.  Of course he told me that he’d got on to some better paying thing,” she added, anxious to show that she was not shut out from the secrets of his heart; “but when you said Metropolis I didn’t take it in.”

Lucia made no further attempt to converse.  She said good-night and followed Sophie Roots to her tiny room.

“That was rather dreadful,” she said to herself.  “I wonder—­” But if she did not linger long over her wondering neither did she stop to find out why she was so passionately anxious to think well of the woman who was to be Keith Rickman’s wife, and why it was such a relief to her to be angry with Sophie for teasing the poor child.