And then Lucy had turned and asked one of those questions, difficult to answer truthfully to one who, even if in her parents' eyes a child, was yet a woman grown: "Mother, I want to ask you something. Is it very wrong, always wrong, for a woman to like another man better than she likes her husband? How can she help it if the man to whom she is married is such a man as Mr. Pedro Rebell seems to be?" But Mrs. Kemp answered with unwonted decision and sharpness: "There is a moment--there is always a moment--when the matter is in a woman's own hands and conscience. And in any case, Lucy, two wrongs don't make a right!" And with this the girl had to be content, but the question made Mrs. Kemp more than ever determined to discontinue her daughter's growing intimacy with poor Barbara. First Oliver Boringdon, and then James Berwick,--this Mrs. Rebell must indeed be an unfit friend for her little Lucy! To Madame Sampiero, who lay at the other end of the corridor out of which opened the Queen's Room, the doctor would sometimes declare, "I've little mind for the part I am playing." But when she answered, with perplexity and fear in her large blue eyes, "Why then do you play it?" he would content himself with shrugging his shoulders, and muttering between his teeth, "Because I'm a sentimental old fool!" But, whatever the reason, so well had Doctor McKirdy managed the extraordinary situation, that not till Mrs. Rebell was promoted to getting up and coming downstairs, did the long hours spent by Berwick in her company provoke the kind of gossip which had finally reached the ears of Mrs. Boringdon. Even then what was repeated had been said in jest. Was it likely, so the humble gossips of Chancton would have declared, that such a gentleman as Mr. Berwick would fancy a lady who was by all accounts half burnt to a cinder! * * * * * When Madame Sampiero had suddenly made up her mind to be moved downstairs, Barbara knew that the old Scotchman and her god-mother had entered into a conspiracy to put an end to what she considered her innocent, if peculiar, intimacy with James Berwick. There took place in her heart a silent, but none the less strong, movement of passionate revolt,--she thought this attempt to check their friendship the more cruel inasmuch as Berwick had to be away a good deal and could only now and again snatch a day from London. Still, it was then, not perhaps till then, that Mrs. Rebell began to foresee the logical outcome of the situation into which she had allowed herself to drift.