‘My dear,’ said Albinia, affectionately, ’you had better compose yourself and follow him.  His uncle will bring him to reason, and then you can tell him how sorry we are.’

‘You may assure him,’ said Mr. Kendal, ’that I am as much hurt as he can be, that such an improper use should have been made of O’More’s intimacy here, and I mean to mark my sense of it.’

‘And,’ said Lucy, ’I don’t think anything would pacify him so much as Maurice being only a little beaten, not to hurt him, you know.’

‘If Maurice be punished, it shall not be in revenge,’ said Mr. Kendal.

‘I’m afraid nothing else will do,’ said Lucy, wringing her hands.  ’He has really declared that he will not sleep another night here unless Maurice is punished; and whatever he says, he’ll do, and I know it would kill me to go away in this manner.’

Her father confidently averred that he would do no such thing, but she cried so much as to move Maurice into exclaiming, ’Look here, Lucy, I’ll come up with you, and let him give me one good punch, and then we shall all be comfortable again.’

‘I don’t know about the punching,’ said Albinia; ’but I think the least you can do, Maurice, is to go and ask his forgiveness for having been so very naughty.  You were not thinking what you were about when you locked him in.’

This measure was adopted, Mr. Kendal accompanying Lucy and the boy, while Albinia went in search of Sophy, whom she found in grandmamma’s room, looking very pale.  ‘Well?’ was the inquiry, and she told what had passed.

‘I hope Maurice will be punished,’ said Sophy; so unwonted a sentiment, that Albinia quite started, though it was decidedly her own opinion.

‘That meddling with papers was very bad,’ she said, with an extenuating smile.

‘Fun is a perfect demon when it becomes master,’ said Sophy.  It was plain that it was not Maurice that she was thinking of, but the caricature.  Her sister should have been sacred from derision.

‘We must remember,’ she said, ’that it was only through Maurice’s meddling that we became aware of the existence of this precious work.  It is not as if ho had shown it to any one.

‘How many of the O’Mores have made game of it?’ asked Sophy, bitterly.  ’No, I am glad I know of it, I shall not be deceived any more.’

With these words she withdrew, evidently resolved to put an end to the subject.  Her face was like iron, and Albinia grieved for the deep resentment that the man whom she had ventured to think of as devoted to herself, had made game of her sister.  Poor Sophy, to her that tryste had been a subject of unmitigated affliction and shame, and it was a cruel wound that Ulick O’More should, of all men, have turned it into ridicule.  What would be the effect on her?

In process of time Mr. Kendal returned.  ‘Albinia,’ he said, ’this is a most unfortunate affair.  He is perfectly impracticable, insists on starting for Paris to-morrow, and I verily believe he will.’