th nobody but you near to see the first mortifying effect of the shock
which I shall inflict on her.

"I have only to add, before I release you, that I write these lines in
the strictest confidence. You have promised not to mention my
disfigurement to Lucilla, unless I first give you leave. I now, more than
ever, hold you to that promise. The few people about me here, are all
pledged to secrecy as you are. If it is really inevitable that she should
know the truth--I alone must tell it; in my own way, and at my own time."

"If it must come," "if it is really inevitable"--these phrases in Oscar's
letter satisfied me that he was already beginning to comfort himself with
an insanely delusive idea--the idea that it might be possible permanently
to conceal the ugly personal change in him from Lucilla's knowledge.

If I had been at Dimchurch, I have no doubt I should have begun to feel
seriously uneasy at the turn which things appeared to be taking now.

But distance has a very strange effect in altering one's customary way of
thinking of affairs at home. Being in Italy instead of in England, I
dismissed Lucilla's antipathies and Oscar's scruples, as both alike
unworthy of serious consideration. Sooner or later, time (I considered)
would bring these two troublesome young people to their senses. Their
marriage would follow, and there would be an end of it! In the meanwhile,
I continued to feast good Papa on Holy Families and churches. Ah, poor
dear, how he yawned over Caraccis and cupolas! and how fervently he
promised never to fall in love again, if I would only take him back to
Paris!

We set our faces homeward a day or two after the receipt of Oscar's
letter. I left my reformed father, resting his aching old bones in his
own easy-chair; capable perhaps, even yet, of contracting a Platonic
attachment to a lady of his own time of life--but capable (as I firmly
believed) of nothing more. "Oh, my child, let me rest!" he said, when I
wished him good-bye. "And never show me a church or a picture again as
long as I live!"

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST

Madame Pratolungo Returns to Dimchurch

I REACHED London in the last week of Lucilla's residence under her aunt's
roof, and waited in town until it was time to take her back to Dimchurch.

As soon as it had become obviously too late for Oscar to risk the dreaded
meeting with Lucilla before strangers, his correspondence had, as a
matter of course, assumed a brighter tone.