"Does she! Jane and I have been concocting a charming little plot about you, Lucy. We are going to have your old room made ready, and the sweet-scented lavender sheets put on the bed, and get you over to us. For good, if you will stop; long enough to recruit your health if you will not. Don't you remember how you used to talk in the holidays about the home sheets; saying you only got them smelling of soap at school?" A faint smile, like a shade, flitted over Lucy Bird's face at the reminiscence. "I should not know the feel of fine white linen sheets now: coarse calico ones have had to content me this many a day. Let me turn, Robert! For my own sake, I would rather not meet your wife. You cannot know how I feel about seeing old friends; those who--who----" Those who once knew me, she meant to say; but broke down with a sob. Robert kept walking on. Lucy was a great deal younger than he, and had been used to yield to him from the time she was a child. Well for her would it have been, that she had yielded to his opinion when Captain Bird came a-courting to Timberdale. "You have company at your house, perhaps, Robert?" "There's not a soul but Jane and me. The Coneys asked us to dine there to-day, but we thought we'd have the first Sunday to ourselves. We went to church this morning; and I came out after dinner to ask after old Arkwright: they fear he is dying." She made no further opposition, and Robert took her into the Court, to the warm dining-room. Jane was not there. Robert put her into the arm-chair that used to be their father's, and brought her a glass of wine. "No, thank you," she faintly said. "You must take it, Lucy." "I am afraid. My head is weak." "A sign you want something good to strengthen it," he urged; and she drank the wine. "And now take off your bonnet, Lucy, and make yourself at home, whilst I go to seek Jane," said he. "Lucy is here," he whispered, when he had found his wife. "The merest shadow you ever saw. A wan, faded thing that one's heart bleeds to look upon. We must try and keep her for a bit, Jane." "Oh, Robert, if we can! And nurse her into health." "And deliver her from that brute she calls husband--as I should prefer to put it, Jane. Her life with him must be something woeful." When they got in, she was leaning forward in the chair, crying silently. In the clear old room, with all its familiar features about her, memory could only have its most painful sway. Her grand old father with his grand old white hair used to sit where she was sitting; her brothers had each his appointed place; and she was a lovely bright child amongst them, petted by all; the sentimental girl with her head as brimful of romance as ever the other Lucy Ashton's had been, when she went out to her trysts with the Master of Ravenswood. Which had been the more bitter fate in after-life--that Lucy's or this one's?