“There was no obligation.  It was kinder to Mr. Rickman to take his room than refuse it, that was all.”

Lucia had no difficulty whatever in bringing out the name.  And that, if Edith’s perceptions had not been dulled by horror, would have struck her as a favourable sign.

“Young Rickman!” Edith’s astonishment was a master stroke in all that it ignored and in all that it implied of the impossibility of that person.  “Your notions of kindness are more than I can understand.  Whatever possessed you to take his room?  If he’d offered it fifty times!”

“But it wasn’t wanted.”

Edith relaxed the tension of her indignant body and sank back in her chair (or rather, Mr. Rickman’s chair) with an immense relief.  “You mean he isn’t in the house at present?”

“Oh yes, he’s in the house, I’m glad to say.  Neither Sophie nor I could stand very much of the house without him.”

That admission, instead of rousing Edith to renewed indignation, appeared to crush her.  “Lucia,” she murmured, “you are hopeless.”

Another cup of tea, however, revived the spirit of remonstrance.

“I know you don’t see it, Lucia, but you are laying yourself under an obligation of the worst sort; the sort that puts a woman more than anything in a man’s power.”

Lucia ignored the baser implication (so like Lucia).  “I’m under so many obligations to Mr. Rickman already, that one more hardly counts.”  She hastened to appease the dumb distress now visible on her cousin’s face.  “I don’t mean money obligations; though there’s that, too—­Horace knows all about it.  I don’t know if I can explain—­” She laid her hands in her lap and looked at Edith and beyond her, with liquid and untroubled eyes; not seeing her, but seeing things very far off, invisible from Edith’s point of view; which things she must endeavour, if possible, to make her see.  “The kind of obligations I mean are so difficult to describe, because there’s nothing to take hold of.  Only, when you’ve once made a man believe in you and trust you, so that he comes to you ever afterwards expecting nothing but wonderful discernment, and irreproachable tact, and—­and an almost impalpable delicacy of treatment, and you know that you failed in all these things just when he needed them most, you do feel some obligations.  There’s the obligation to make up for your blunders; the obligation to think about him in a certain way because no other way does justice to his idea of you; the obligation to show him the same consideration he showed to you; the obligation to take a simple kindness from him as he would have taken it from you—­”

“My dear Lucia, you forget that a man may accept many things from a woman that she cannot possibly accept from him.”

“Yes, but they are quite another set of things.  They don’t come into it at all.  That’s where you make the mistake, Edith.  I’ve got—­for my own sake—­to behave to that man as finely as he behaved to me.  I owe him a sort of spiritual redress.  I always shall owe it him; but I’m doing something towards it now.”  She said to herself, “I am a fool to try to explain it to her.  She’ll never understand.  I wish Kitty were here.  She would have understood in a minute.”