“If you had only told me!” Her head sank lower than before.

“My darling, I may have been mistaken.  I have been so, many times; but I wished to avoid mentioning him to you.  I hoped you were forgetting.”

“Never; never for an hour,” she said, half to herself.  “No, mamma, for I thought he had not forgotten.”

“But you sent him away yourself, my child.  Remember, you would not even let me see him.  He could not have supposed that you meant your answer to be anything but decisive.”

“I did mean it to be decisive; but he refused to take it so.  He said, ‘Perhaps in a year;’ and it is not a year yet.”

Mrs. Costello listened in utter surprise.  Lucia had much to say now.  Broken words and sentences, which showed, by degrees, how her mind, as it recovered from the shock of other troubles, had gone back to dwell upon the hope of Percy’s return, and which explained more fully why she had been so utterly blind to the schemes which were formed around her.  In one point only she failed.  She did not, with all her own faith in it, convey to her mother the impression of Percy’s real earnestness in their last interview.  That he had really loved her, she still believed; but she did not at all understand his shallow and easily-influenced character.  Mrs. Costello, on the other hand, was predisposed to take the worst view, and to congratulate herself upon it, since it had helped to leave Lucia free.  But not believing that the poor girl had been the object of a genuine, though transient passion, she for once was ready to judge her hardly, and to accuse her of having been wilfully and foolishly deceived.

There was a bitter pang to the mother’s heart in thinking this; but the recollections of her own youth made the idea the less improbable to her, and made her also the gentler, even in her injustice.  She said not a word of blame, but coaxed from her child the story of the meeting that morning, that she might find out how much Maurice had seen or heard of the truth.  He understood all.  Lucia said so frankly, though she blushed at the confession; he had not needed to be told, and he had been so good!

Mrs. Costello could have groaned aloud.  It needed an effort to keep still, and not express the anger and impatience she felt.  Maurice!  Maurice, who was worth fifty Percys!  Maurice, who was devoted heart and soul to this girl; who had been content to love her and wait for her, through good and evil fortune, through change and absence and silence, and, after all, she had no feeling for him but this heartless kind of gratitude!  Because at the very last, when he had thought her certainly his own, he had endured, out of his great love, to see all his hopes swept away, and her grieving for his rival; therefore he had just so much claim upon her—­“He was so good!”