"My dear," said Miss Marjoribanks, "it is quite easy to understand, and I know exactly what you mean. You want me to tell you all about Mr Beverley, and what I said to him, and what he has in his mind. If he is the something of your own you would like to go away to, I think it is a pity. I am sure he has a temper, and _I_ would not marry him for my part. But if you mean _me_, I have nothing to go away to," said Lucilla, with a little scorn. "I should be ashamed not to be enough for myself. When I leave you it is not to enjoy myself, but to think about you and to plan for you; and all that you want to know is about _him_!" said Miss Marjoribanks, piercing through and through the thin armour of her incapable assailant. Naturally all the widow's defences fell before this ruthless response. She cried with a mingled sensation of shame at being found out, and penitence for being so ungrateful, and a certain desolate distress with her own incapacity and want of power to defend herself. It was an acute variety of feminine anguish on the whole. The idea that she, a mature woman, a married woman and widow, who ought to have been done with all these vanities, should have been found out by a young girl to be thinking about _a gentleman_, struck poor Mrs Mortimer with a sharp sense of shame as if her wistful preoccupation had been a crime. Indeed the chances are, if it had been a crime, she would not have been nearly so much ashamed of it. She hid her face in her hands and blushed down to the very edge of her black dress and up into the glooms of her widow's veil; and all the self-defence she was capable of was a faint "Oh, Lucilla!" a mere appeal of weakness without reason--a virtual throwing of herself in acknowledged guilt at her judge's feet. "Thomas is coming with the tea," said Miss Marjoribanks. "Come into my room and take off your bonnet. What is the good of worrying yourself when you know I have taken it into my own hands? Spoiling your eyes with crying, and making everybody uncomfortable never does the least good; and, besides, one never knows what harm one might do one's self," said Lucilla seriously. "I don't think you gone off at all, for my part; but if you don't take proper care----I shall give you some rose-water, and you will be all right after you have had a cup of tea."