vants to share it
with him; at Dr. West's there would have been her sisters; at Lady
Verner's there was her husband alone. Times upon times Lionel felt
inclined to run away; as the disobedient boys run to sea.

The little hint, dropped by Dr. West, touching the past, had not been
without its fruits in Sibylla's mind. It lay and smouldered there. _Had_
Lionel been attached to Lucy?--had there been love-scenes, love-making
between them? Sibylla asked herself the questions ten times in a day.
Now and then she let drop a sharp, acrid bit of venom to him--his "old
love, Lucy." Lionel would receive it with impassibility, never
answering.

On the day spoken of in the last chapter, when Matthew Frost was dying,
she was more ill at ease, more intensely irritable, than usual. Lady
Verner had gone with some friends to Heartburg, and was not expected
home until night; Decima and Lucy walked out in the afternoon, and
Sibylla was alone. Lionel had not been home since he went out in the
morning to see Matthew Frost. The fact was Lionel had had a busy day of
it: what with old Matthew and what with his conversation with John
Massingbird afterwards, certain work which ought to have been done in
the morning he had left till the afternoon. It was nothing unusual for
him to be out all day; but Sibylla was choosing to make his being out on
this day an unusual grievance. As the hours of the afternoon passed on
and on, and it grew late, and nobody appeared, she could scarcely
suppress her temper, her restlessness. She was a bad one to be alone;
had never liked to be alone for five minutes in her life; and thence
perhaps the secret of her having made so much of a companion of her
maid, Benoite. In point of fact, Sibylla Verner had no resources within
herself; and she made up for the want by indulging in her naturally bad
temper.

Where were they? Where was Decima? Where was Lucy? Above all, where was
Lionel? Sibylla, not being able to answer the questions, suddenly began
to get up a pretty little plot of imagination--that Lucy and Lionel were
somewhere together. Had Sibylla possessed one of Sam Weller's patent
self-acting microscopes, able to afford a view through space and stairs
and deal doors, she might have seen Lionel seated alone in the study at
Verner's Pride, amidst his leases and papers; and Lucy in Clay Lane,
paying visits with Decima from cottage to cottage. Not possessing one of
those admirable instruments--if somebody at the Wes