“Well, I can’t let you take these sonnets on trust.  For this time, your principle doesn’t apply, you see.  You can’t say you’re accepting this dedication because I don’t want to give it to you.”  Though he laughed he rose and backed towards the door, suddenly anxious to be gone.

“Isn’t it enough that I want to accept it?”

He shook his head, still backing, and at the door he paused to speak.  “You’ve accepted nothing—­as yet.”

“Of course,” she said to herself, “it would have been wiser to have read them first.  But I can trust him.”

But as she was about to read them a knock, a familiar knock at the door interrupted her.  “Kitty!”

She laid the manuscript hastily aside, well out of Kitty’s roving sight.  She had noticed how his hands had trembled as he brought it; she did not notice that her own shook a little in thus putting it away from her.

Kitty Palliser, up in town for a week, had come less on her own account than as an impetuous ambassador from the now frantic Edith.  She too was prepared to move heaven and earth, if only she could snatch her Lucy from Tavistock Place.  But her anxiety was not wholly on Lucia’s account, as presently appeared.

“How can you stand it for a minute?” said she.

“I’m standing it very well indeed.”

“But what on earth do you find to do all day long, when,” said Kitty severely, “you’re not talking to young Rickman?”

“All day long I go out, or lie down and read, or talk to Sophie.”

“And in the evenings?”

“In the evenings sometimes I make an old man happy by playing.”

“And I expect you’re making a young man unhappy by playing, too—­a very dangerous game.”

“Kitty, that young man is perfectly happy.  He’s going to be married.”

“All the worse.  Then you’ll make a young woman unhappy as well.  This little game would be dangerous enough with a man of your own set.  It isn’t fair to play it with him, Lucy, when you know the rules and he doesn’t.”

“I assure you, Kitty, he knows them as well as you or I do; better.”

“I doubt it.”  Kitty’s eyes roamed round the room (they had not lost their alert and hungry look) and they took in the situation at a glance.  That move in the game would never have been made if he had known the rules.  How could she let him make it?

“Really, Lucy, for a nice woman you do the queerest things.”

“And, really, Kitty, for a clever woman, you say the stupidest.  You’re getting like Edith.”

“I am not like Edith.  I only say stupid things.  She thinks them.  What’s more, in thinking them she only thinks of herself and her precious family.  I’m thinking of you, dear, and”—­Kitty’s voice grew soft—­“and of him.  You ought to think of him a little too.”

“I do think of him.  I’ve been thinking of him all the time.”

“I know you have.  But don’t let him suffer because of the insanely beautiful way you have of thinking.”