o'clock, which was the hour, Fanny had
told her, when George and his mother were to leave upon their long
journey, Lucy touched that scorched place on her mantel with her
hand just as the little clock above it struck. Then, after this
odd, unconscious gesture, she went to a window and stood between the
curtains, looking out into the cold November dusk; and in spite of every
reasoning and reasonable power within her, a pain of loneliness struck
through her heart. The dim street below her window, the dark houses
across the way, the vague air itself--all looked empty, and cold and
(most of all) uninteresting. Something more sombre than November dusk
took the colour from them and gave them that air of desertion.

The light of her fire, flickering up behind her showed suddenly a flying
group of tiny snowflakes nearing the window-pane; and for an instant she
felt the sensation of being dragged through a snows drift under a
broken cutter, with a boy's arms about her--an arrogant, handsome,
too-conquering boy, who nevertheless did his best to get hurt himself,
keeping her from any possible harm.

She shook the picture out of her eyes indignantly, then came and sat
before her fire, and looked long and long at the blackened mantelpiece.
She did not have the mantelpiece repainted--and, since she did not,
might as well have kept his photographs. One forgets what made the scar
upon his hand but not what made the scar upon his wall.

She played no marche funebre upon her piano, even though Chopin's
romantic lamentation was then at the top of nine-tenths of the
music-racks in the country, American youth having recently discovered
the distinguished congeniality between itself and this deathless bit of
deathly gloom. She did not even play "Robin Adair"; she played "Bedelia"
and all the new cake-walks, for she was her father's housekeeper,
and rightly looked upon the office as being the same as that of his
heart-keeper. Therefore it was her affair to keep both house and heart
in what state of cheerfulness might be contrived. She made him "go out"
more than ever; made him take her to all the gayeties of that winter,
declining to go herself unless he took her, and, though Eugene danced
no more, and quoted Shakespeare to prove all lightfoot caperings beneath
the dignity of his age, she broke his resolution for him at the New
Year's Eve "Assembly" and half coaxed, half dragged him forth upon the
floor, and made him dance the New Year in w