“No; I like it. The more we can get out of old-fashioned grooves the better I am pleased. I should be a radical to-morrow—a regular man of the people,—only I should break my mother’s heart.” “Whatever you do, Lord Lufton, do not do that.” “That is why I have liked you so much,” he continued, “because you get out of the grooves.” “Do I?” “Yes; and go along by yourself, guiding your own footsteps; not carried hither and thither, just as your grandmother’s old tramway may chance to take you.” “Do you know I have a strong idea that my grandmother’s old tramway will be the safest and the best after all? I have not left it very far, and I certainly mean to go back to it.” “That’s impossible! An army of old women, with coils of ropes made out of time-honoured prejudices, could not drag you back.” “No, Lord Lufton, that is true. But one—” and then she stopped herself. She could not tell him that one loving mother, anxious for her only son, had sufficed to do it. She could not explain to him that this departure from the established tramway had already broken her own rest, and turned her peaceful happy life into a grievous battle. “I know that you are trying to go back,” he said. “Do you think that I have eyes and cannot see? Come, Lucy, you and I have been friends, and we must not part in this way. My mother is a paragon among women. I say it in earnest;—a paragon among women: and her love for me is the perfection of motherly love.” “It is, it is; and I am so glad that you acknowledge it.” “I should be worse than a brute did I not do so; but, nevertheless, I cannot allow her to lead me in all things. Were I to do so, I should cease to be a man.” “Where can you find any one who will counsel you so truly?” “But, nevertheless, I must rule myself. I do not know whether my suspicions may be perfectly just, but I fancy that she has created this estrangement between you and me. Has it not been so?” “Certainly not by speaking to me,” said Lucy, blushing ruby-red through every vein of her deep-tinted face. But though she could not command her blood, her voice was still under her control—her voice and her manner. “But has she not done so? You, I know, will tell me nothing but the truth.” “I will tell you nothing on this matter, Lord Lufton, whether true or false. It is a subject on which it does not concern me to speak.” “Ah! I understand,” he said; and rising from his chair, he stood against the chimney-piece with his back to the fire. “She cannot leave me alone to choose for myself my own friends, and my own—;” but he did not fill up the void. “But why tell me this, Lord Lufton?” “No! I am not to choose my own friends, though they be among the best and purest of God’s creatures. Lucy, I cannot think that you have ceased to have a regard for me. That you had a regard for me, I am sure.”