the other person.  Nobody can help their thoughts; and there was something positively indecent in the uncanny insight that divined them.  All the same, Edith, confronted with the consequences of these movements of the unfettered brain, was stung with compunction and considerable shame.  Horace would be furious when he knew; more furious with Edith than Lucia.  Therefore Edith was furious with Sophia Roots, the cause of this disaster, who must have known that even if Lucia was too weak-minded to refuse her most improper invitation, that invitation ought never to have been given.  Edith had her pride, the pride of all the Jewdwines and the Hardens; and her private grievances gave way before a family catastrophe.  She did not want Lucia at Hampstead; but at all cost to herself Lucia must be brought back to her cousin’s house before anybody knew that she had ever left it.  It was even better that Horace should marry her than that they should risk the scandal of a mesalliance, or even-a passing acquaintance with a man like Rickman.  She would go and fetch Lucia now, this very evening.

She went as fast as a hansom could take her, and was shown up into Rickman’s room where she had the good luck to find Lucia alone.  Lucia was too tired to go out very much; and at that moment of her cousin’s entrance she was resting on Mr. Rickman’s sofa.  As the poor poet had been so careful to remove the more telling tokens of his occupation, Edith did not see that it was Mr. Rickman’s room; and she was a little surprised to find Sophia Roots so comfortably, not to say luxuriously lodged.

She lost no time in delivering her soul, lest Sophia should pop in upon them.

“Lu-chee-a,” she said with emphasis, “I think you ought to have told me.”

“Told you what?”

“Why, that you hadn’t anywhere to go to, instead of coming here.”

“But I didn’t come here because I hadn’t anywhere to go to.  I came because I wanted to see something of Sophie after all these years.”

“You could have seen Sophie at Hampstead.  I would have asked her to stay with you if I’d known you wanted her.”

“That would have been very nice of you.  But I’m afraid she wouldn’t have come.  You see she can’t leave her work at the Museum—­ever, poor thing.”

“Oh.  Then you don’t see so much of Sophie after all?”

“Not as much as I should like.  But I must be somewhere; and I’m perfectly happy here.”

As she rose to make tea for Edith (at the poet’s table, and with the poet’s brass kettle), she looked, to Edith’s critical eyes, most suspiciously at home.  Edith’s eyes, alert for literature, roamed over the bookcases before they settled on the tea-pot (the poet’s tea-pot); but it was the tea-pot that brought her to her point.  Did Lucia mix with the other boarders after all?

“This isn’t a bad room,” she said.  “I suppose you have all your meals up here?”

“Only tea and breakfast.”