awake at night, thinking
of it; but I do not say so to Decima and Lady Verner. I make light of it
to them, as you are making light of it to me."

"I know, I know!" he uttered in a tone that would have been a passionate
one, but for its wailing despair. "My whole life, for a long while, has
been one long scene of acting--to you. I dare not make it otherwise.
There's no remedy for it."

She had not anticipated the outburst; she had simply wished to express
her true feeling of sympathy for their great misfortunes, as she might
have expressed it to any other gentleman who had been turned from his
home with his wife. She could not bear for Lionel not to know that he
had her deepest, her kindliest, her truest sympathy, and this had
nothing to do with any secret feeling she might, or might not, entertain
for him. Indeed, but for the unpleasant, latent consciousness of that
very feeling, Lucy would have made her sympathy more demonstrative. The
outbreak seemed to check her; to throw her friendship back upon herself;
and she stood irresolute; but she was too single-minded, too full of
nature's truth, to be angry with what had been a genuine outpouring of
his inmost heart, drawn from him in a moment of irrepressible sorrow.
Lionel let the ornament fall back on the mantel-piece, and turned to
her, his manner changing. He took her hands, clasping them in one of
his; he laid his other hand lightly on her fair young head, reverently
as any old grandfather might have done.

"Lucy!--my dear friend!--you must not mistake me. There are times when
some of the bitterness within me is drawn forth, and I say more than I
ought: what I never should say, in a calmer moment. I wish I _could_
talk to you; I wish I could give you the full confidence of all my
sorrows, as I gave it you on another subject once before. I wish I could
draw you to my side, as though you were my sister, or one of my dearest
friends, and tell you of the great trouble at my heart. But it cannot
be, I thank you, I _thank_ you for your sympathy. I know that you would
give me your friendship in all single-heartedness, as Decima might give
it me; and it would be to me a green spot of brightness in life's arid
desert. But the green spot might for me grow too bright, Lucy; and my
only plan is to be wise in time, and to forego it."

"I did but mean to express my sorrow for you and Mrs. Verner," she
timidly answered; "my sense of the calamity which has fallen upon you."

"C