the hidden causes of Jeffrey's downfall.
She was sure his father knew, and it never seemed to her that these two
sisters were less than sisters to him. What she herself knew, they too
must have learned; out of this believing candour she spoke.

"You mustn't forget there was the necklace, and Madame Beattie expecting
to be paid."

Lydia was breathless in her extremity of surprise.

"What necklace?" asked she.

"Don't you know?"

Miss Amabel's voice rose upon the horror of her own betrayal.

"What do you mean?" Lydia was insisting, with an iteration that sounded
like repeated onslaughts, a mental pounce, to shake it out of her. "What
do you mean?"

Miss Amabel wore the dignified Addington aloofness.

"I am very sorry," said she. "I have been indiscreet."

"But you'll tell me, now you've begun," panted Lydia. "You'll have to
tell me or I shall go crazy."

"We must both control ourselves," said Miss Amabel, with a further
retreat to the decorum of another generation. "You are not going crazy,
Lydia. We are both tired and we feel the heat. And I shall not tell
you."

Lydia ran out of the room. There was no other word for the quickness of
her going. She fled like running water, and having worn no hat, she
found herself bareheaded in the street, hurrying on to Esther's. An
instinct told her she could only do her errand, make her assault, it
seemed, on those who knew what she did not, if she never paused to weigh
the difficulties: her hatreds, too, for they had to be weighed. Lydia
was sure she hated Madame Beattie and Esther. She would not willingly
speak to them, she had thought, after her last encounters. But now she
was letting the knocker fall on Esther's door, and had asked the
discreet maid with the light eyelashes, who always somehow had an air of
secret knowledge and amusement, if Madame Beattie were at home, and gave
her name. The maid, with what seemed to Lydia's raw consciousness an
ironical courtesy, invited her into the library and left her there in
its twilight tranquillity. Lydia stood still, holding one of her
pathetically small, hard-worked hands over her heart, and shortly, to
her gratitude, Sophy was back and asked her to go up to Madame Beattie's
room.

The maid accompanying her, Lydia went, with her light step, afraid of
itself lest it turn coward, and in the big dark room at the back of the
house, its gloom defined by the point of light from a shaded reading
candle, she was left, and stoo