Their home arrangements were different to those they had made in Paris.  Here they were really lodgers, and their landlady, Madame Everaert, waited on them.  She was a fat, good natured, half Dutch widow, who took from the first a lively interest in the invalid mother, and in the daughter who would have been so handsome if she had been stouter and more rosy; and in a very little while she found that her new lodgers had one quality, which above all others gave them a claim on her good will, they were excellent listeners.  Almost every evening in the twilight she would come herself to their sitting-room, with the lamp, or with some other errand for an excuse, and would stay chattering in her droll Flemish French for at least half an hour.  This came to be one of the features of the day.  Another was a daily walk, which Lucia had most frequently to take alone, but which always gave her either from the shore, or from the ramparts, a long sorrowful look over the sea towards England—­towards Canada perhaps—­or instead of either, to some far-away fairy country where there were no mistakes and no misunderstandings.

Between these two—­between morning and evening—­time was almost a blank.  Lucia had completely given up her habits of study.  She did not even read novels, except aloud; and when she was not in some way occupied in caring for her mother, she sat hour after hour by the window, with a piece of crochet, which seemed a second Penelope’s web, for it never was visibly larger one day than it had been the day before.  Mrs. Costello gradually grew anxious as she perceived how dull and inanimate her daughter remained.  She would almost have been glad of an excuse for giving her a gentle scolding, but Lucia’s entire submission and sweetness of temper made it impossible.  There seemed nothing to be done, but to try to force her into cheerful occupation, and to hope that time and her own good sense would do the rest.  Hitherto they had had no piano; they got one, and for a day or two Lucia made a languid pretence of practising.  But one day she was turning over her music, among which were a number of quaint old English songs and madrigals, which she and Maurice had jointly owned long ago at Cacouna, when she came upon one the words of which she had been used to laugh at, much to the annoyance of her fellow-singers.  She had a half remembrance of them, and turned the pages to look if they were really so absurd.  The music she knew well, and how the voices blended in the quaint pathetic harmony.

      “Out alas! my faith is ever true,
      Yet will she never rue,
      Nor grant me any grace. 
  I sit and sigh, I weep, I faint, I die,
  While she alone refuseth sympathy.”

She shut the music up, and would have said, if anybody had asked her, that she had no patience with such foolish laments, even in poetry; but, nevertheless, the verse stayed in her memory, haunted her fancy perpetually, and seemed like a living voice in her ears—­