“Do you love--Come, darling Lucy, don't be angry with me. I never meant to wound your feelings. Don't sob that way, my dear, dear Lucy. You know what a rough coarse fellow I am; but I'd rather die than offend you. Why did you not tell me of all this? I never liked any one so well as Trafford, and why leave me to the chance of misconstruing him? Would n't it have been the best way to have trusted me as you always have?” “I don't see what there was to have confided to you. Mr. Trafford might, if he wished. I mean, that if there was a secret at all. I don't know what I mean,” cried she, covering her face with her handkerchief, while a convulsive motion of her shoulders showed how she was moved. “I am as glad as if I had got a thousand pounds, to know you have been so right, so thoroughly right, in all this, Lucy; and I am glad, too, that Trafford has done nothing to make me think less well of him. Let's be friends; give me your hand, like a dear, good girl, and forgive me if I have said what pained you.” “I am not angry, Tom,” said she, giving her hand, but with her head still averted. “God knows it's not the time for us to fall out,” said he, with a shaking voice. “Going to separate as we are, and when to be together again not so easy to imagine.” “You are surely going out with papa?” asked she, eagerly. “No; they say not.” “Who says not?” “The governor himself--Sir Brook--old Mills--everybody, in fact. They have held a committee of the whole house on it. I think Nicholas was present too; and it has been decided that as I am very much given to idleness, bitter beer, and cigars, I ought not to be anywhere where these ingredients compose the chief part of existence. Now the Cape is precisely one of these places; and if you abstract the idleness, the bitter beer, and the tobacco, there is nothing left but a little Hottentotism, which is neither pleasant nor profitable. Voted, therefore, I am not to go to the Cape. It is much easier, however, to open the geography books, and show all the places I am unfit for, than to hit upon the one that will suit me. And so I am going up to Dublin to-morrow with Sir Brook to consult--I don't well know whom, perhaps a fortune-teller--what 's to be done with me. All I do know is, I am to see my grandfather, and to wait on the Viceroy, and I don't anticipate that any of us will derive much pleasure from either event.” “Oh, Tom! what happiness it would be to me if grandpapa--” She stopped, blushed, and tried in vain to go on.