always sit up for you, Maurice? Is he afraid to trust you?"

"Lucia!" His tone was angry now, and silenced her. In another minute
they stopped at the gate of the cottage.

Mrs. Costello had heard the sound of their wheels, and instantly opened
the door. Lucia's half-formed intention of making some kind of apology
for her petulance, had no time to ripen. Maurice helped her down without
speaking, bade her good night, exchanged a word or two with her mother,
and drove slowly away again.

Mother and daughter went in together to Lucia's room; but Mrs. Costello,
noticing that her child looked pale and weary, left her almost
immediately. Lucia instantly flew to the window. The farmhouse where Mr.
Leigh and Maurice lived was so near that the lights in its different
windows could be plainly distinguished. After a moment, the one which
had been burning steadily as they passed the house, flickered suddenly,
disappeared, and then, shone more brightly through the opening door.

"He is at home," said Lucia to herself. "Poor Maurice, how good he is!
What on earth made me so cross?"

She continued to watch. Presently the light which had returned to the
sitting-room vanished altogether, and a fainter gleam stole out from
what she knew to be the window of Maurice's room. She said "Good-night"
softly, as if he could hear her, dropped her curtain, and was soon fast
asleep.

That night Mrs. Costello's lamp was extinguished long before Maurice's.
Tired and dispirited, he had seated himself before his little
writing-table, and given himself up to a dream of no pleasant kind. It
was so completely the habit of his life to think of Lucia that it would
have been strange if her image had not been prominent in his
meditations; but to-night for the first time he tried to get rid of this
image. He was used to her whims and changing moods, to her waywardness
and occasional tyranny. When he was a boy they had often quarrelled, and
taxed the efforts of his sister Alice, Lucia's inseparable friend, to
reconcile them; but since his long absence at college, and, above all,
since Alice's death, they had ceased to torment each other. The
relations of master and pupil had been added to those of playfellows,
and their intercourse had run on so smoothly that until to-night Maurice
had never known his charge's full power to irritate him. Like most
persons of steady and equable temperament, he felt deeply annoyed, even
humiliated, by having been surprised i