Thomas left Mrs. Boxall to shut the door, and rushed eagerly up the stairs, and into the sitting-room. There he found the red eyes of which Mattie had spoken. Lucy rose and held out her hand, but her manner was constrained, and her lips trembled as if she were going to cry. Thomas would have put his arm round her and drawn her to him, but she gently pushed his arm away, and he felt as many a man has felt, and every man, perhaps, ought to feel, that in the gentlest repulse of the woman he loves there is something terribly imperative and absolute. "Why, Lucy!" he said, in a tone of hurt; "what have I done?" "If you can forget so soon, Thomas," answered Lucy, "I cannot. Since yesterday I see things in a different light altogether. I cannot, for your sake any more than my own, allow things to go on in this doubtful way." "Oh I but, Lucy, I was taken unawares yesterday; and to-day, now I have slept upon it, I don't see there is any such danger. I ought to be a match for that brute Stopper, anyhow." Yet the brute Stopper had outreached him, or, at least, "served him out," three or four times that very day, and he had refused to acknowledge it to himself, which was all his defense, poor wretch. "But that is not all the question, Thomas. It is not right. At least, it seems to me that it is not right to go on like this. People's friends ought to know. I would not have done it if grannie hadn't been to know. But then I ought to have thought of your friends as well as my own." "But there would be no difficulty if I had only a grandmother," urged Thomas, "and one as good as yours. I shouldn't have thought of not telling." "I don't think the difficulty of doing right makes it unnecessary to do it," said Lucy. "I think you might trust that to me, Lucy," said Thomas, falling back upon his old attempted relation of religious instructor to his friend. Lucy was silent for a moment; but after what she had gone through in the night, she knew that the time had come for altering their relative position if not the relation itself. "No, Thomas," said she; "I must take my own duty into my own hands. I _will_ not go on this way." "Do you think then, Lucy, that in affairs of this kind a fellow ought to do just what his parents want?" "No, Thomas. But I do think he ought not to keep such things secret from them." "Not even if they are unreasonable and tyrannical?" "No. A man who will not take the consequences of loving cannot be much of a lover." "Lucy!" cried Thomas, now stung to the heart. "I can't help it, Thomas," said Lucy, bursting into tears; "I _must_ speak the truth, and if you cannot bear it, the worse for me--and for you, too, Thomas." "Then you mean to give me up?" said Thomas, pathetically, without, however, any real fear of such an unthinkable catastrophe.