d, unperceived in her arrogant ignorance; this was what
she seemed to see in them, and it wrung her heart with vain repentance
and regret. And, as she bent over them there suddenly arose in her mind
a doubt--a question which seemed to have very little to do with those
letters, yet which they certainly helped to raise--had she ever loved
Percy? Lucia was romantic. Like other romantic girls, she would formerly
have said--indeed, she had said to herself many times--"I shall love him
all my life--even if he forgets me I shall still love him." And yet now
she was conscious--dimly, unwillingly conscious, that she thought very
little of him, and that even that little was not at all in the strain
she would have felt to be proper in a deserted heroine of fiction. She
was not the least likely to die of a broken heart for him; she was much
more inclined to die for grief and shame at what had befallen Maurice.
So that question, which was in itself a mortifying one, rose
rebelliously in her mind--had she ever loved Percy? or had she been
wasting her thoughts on a mere lay-figure, dressed up by her own fancy
in attributes not at all belonging to it? Poor child! had she known how
many women--and perhaps men also--do the very same, the idea might not
have seemed quite so horrible to her.

Horrible or not, she put it aside and went back to the letters. In the
earlier ones there were many allusions which seemed almost to belong to
a former existence, so utterly had her life changed since they were
written. The bright days of last summer, before the first cloud came
over her fortunes, seemed to return almost too vividly to her memory;
she would have bargained away a year of her life to be able to regain
the simple happiness of that time. It could never be done; she had
suffered, and had done some good and much evil; the past was ended and
put away for ever; she could not, for all she might give, again set
herself

"To the same key
Of the remembered harmony."

She closed the last letter of the little pile and put them carefully
away. Already they seemed to her one of her most valuable possessions.

Mrs. Costello had finished writing to her cousin. She was busy with
Murray and a map of France; and when Lucia came back she called her.

"Come here, I have half decided."

"Yes, mamma. Where is it?"

"Of course, I cannot be sure. I must make some inquiries; but I think
this will do--Bourg-Cailloux."

Lucia looked where h