“No, Edith, it’s no good.  I’m going to stay till Kitty takes me.”

Edith wondered whether, after all, Lucia was so very fastidious and refined; whether, indeed, in taking after her family, she did not take after the least estimable of the Hardens.  There was a wild strain in them; their women had been known to do queer things, unaccountable, disagreeable, disreputable things; and Lucia was Sir Frederick’s daughter.  Somehow that young voice singing in the next room rubbed this impression into her.  She stiffened and drew back.

“And am I to tell Horace, then, that you are happy here?”

“Yes.  Tell him to come and see how happy I am.”

“Very well.”

As Edith opened the door to go, the voice in the next room stopped singing, and the young man became suddenly very still.

CHAPTER LVII

Lucia lay back in her chair, wondering, not at Edith, but at herself.  Her cousin’s visit had been so far effectual that it had made her aware of the attitude of her own mind.  If she had been told beforehand that she could be happy in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, or within any reasonable distance of such people as Miss Bishop and Mr. Soper, the thing would have appeared to her absurd.  And yet it was so.  She was happy among these dreadful people, as she had not been happy at Hampstead among the cultured and refined.  But when she came to examine into the nature of this happiness she found that it contained no positive element; that it consisted mainly of relief, relief from the strain of an incessant anxiety and uncertainty.  That the strain had been divided between her and Horace had only made it worse, for she had had the larger share of the anxiety, he of the uncertainty.  Not that he was more uncertain than in the old days at Harmouth.  He was less so.  But she had never been anxious then.  For after all they had understood each other; and apparently it was the understanding now that failed.  Yet Horace had been right when he told himself that Lucia would never imply anything, infer anything, claim anything, take anything for granted on the sanction of that understanding.  She would not have hurried by a look or word the slow movements of the love which somehow he had led her to believe in.  Love between man and woman to her mind was a sort of genius; and genius, as she said long ago to poor Rickman, must always have about it a divine uncertainty.  Yes, love too was the wind of the divine spirit blowing where it listeth, the kindling of the divine fire.  She had waited for it patiently, reverently, not altogether humbly, but with a superb possession of her soul.  Better to wait for years than rush to meet it, and so be tossed by the wind and shrivelled by the fire.  Then, when the crash came five years ago, though she could hardly conceive it as altering her cousin’s attitude, she knew that it must alter hers.  The understanding had been partly a family affair; and