"Who's on in it?" asked Flossie, happy and unconscious; and the spirit of mischief seized upon Miss Roots. "I can't tell you. I'm not well posted in these things. But I think you'd better not ask Mr. Rickman to take you to see _Metropolis_." Flossie was mystified, and a little indignant. If the play was so improper, why had Miss Roots taken for granted that she had seen it? "That wasn't at all nice of her, was it?" said Lucia, smiling as Miss Roots went away. Her look was a healing touch laid on Flossie's wounded vanity. "That's the sort of little trap she used to lay for me." "I suppose you mean she was rotting me. I always know when other people are rotting. But that's the worst of her; you never can tell, and she makes you look so ignorant, doesn't she?" "She makes me _feel_ ignorant, but that's another thing." "But whatever did she mean just now?" "Just now she meant that you knew all about _Metropolis_." "Why should I? Do _you_ know anything about it?" "Not much; though it is my cousin's paper. But as Mr. Rickman writes for it, you see--" "Well, how was I to know that? He's always writing for something; and he'd never think of coming to _me_ every time. I never talk shop to him, and he never talks shop to me. Of course he told me that he'd got on to some better paying thing," she added, anxious to show that she was not shut out from the secrets of his heart; "but when you said _Metropolis_ I didn't take it in." Lucia made no further attempt to converse. She said good-night and followed Sophie Roots to her tiny room. "That was rather dreadful," she said to herself. "I wonder--" But if she did not linger long over her wondering neither did she stop to find out why she was so passionately anxious to think well of the woman who was to be Keith Rickman's wife, and why it was such a relief to her to be angry with Sophie for teasing the poor child. CHAPTER LV He asked himself how it was that he had had no premonition of the thing that was about to happen to him; that the supreme moment should have come upon him so casually and with so light a step; that he went to meet it in a mood so commonplace and unprepared? (Good Heavens! He remembered that he had been eating pea soup at the time, and wishing it were artichoke.) Had he not known that she would come back again, and in just that way? Had he not looked for her coming five years ago? And what were five years, after all? How was it that he had heard no summons of the golden and reverberant hour? And what was he going to do with it, or it with him, now that it had come? That was a question that he preferred to leave unanswered for the present.