Kitty was for once mistaken in her judgement, not having all the evidence before her.  The details which would have thrown light on the situation were just those which Lucia preferred to keep to herself.  All that the benevolent Kitty had achieved was to fill her friend’s mind with a new torment.  Lucia had dreaded Rickman’s coming; she had lost all sense of security in his presence.  Still she had understood him.  And now she felt that her very understanding was at fault; that something troubled the fine light she had always viewed him in.  Was it possible that she had never really understood?

Close upon Kitty’s words there came back to her the tilings that Edith had said of him, that Horace had hinted; things that he had confessed to her himself.  Was it possible that he was still that sort of man, the sort that she had vowed she would never marry?  He was not bad; she could not think of him as bad; but was he good?  Was he like her cousin Horace?  No; certainly there was not the smallest resemblance between him and Horace.  With Horace she had always felt—­in one way—­absolutely secure.  If she had ever been uncertain it had not been with this obscure inexplicable dread.

How was it that she had never felt it before?  Never felt it in the first weeks of their acquaintance, when day after day and evening after evening she had sat working with him, here, alone?  When he had appeared to her in the first flush of his exuberant youth, transparent as glass, incapable of reservation or disguise?  It was in those days (he had told her) that he had not been—­good.  And yet her own vision of him had never been purer, her divination subtler than then.  Even in that last week, after her terrible enlightenment at Cannes, when she was ready to suspect every man, even Horace, she had never suspected him.  And in the second period of their friendship, when his character was ripened and full-grown, when she had lived under the same roof with him, she had never had a misgiving or a doubt.  And now there was no end to her doubt.  She could not tell which was the instinct she should trust, or whether she were better able to judge him then or now.  What had become of her calm and lucid insight?  Of the sympathy in which they had once stood each transparent to the other.

For that was the worst of it; that he no longer understood her; and that she had given him cause for misunderstanding (this thought was beginning to keep her awake at night).  She had made it impossible for him to respect her any more.  He had his ideas of what a woman should and should not do, and he had been horrified at finding her so like, and oh, so unlike other women (here Lucia’s mood rose from misery to anger).  She had thought him finer, subtler than that; but he had judged her as he judged such women.  And she had brought that judgement on herself.