This visit made a turning-point in Lucy’s life. She returned home very thoughtful, more serious than usual--a result which seemed very easily comprehensible to her experienced friend. To part with her little brother was another trial for the girl; what wonder that it should bring back the grief that was still so fresh? Lucy said nothing about it; which was quite like her, for she was not a girl who made much show of her feelings. But it was not either her past sorrow--or the present “trial” of parting with Jock that moved Lucy--something else worked in her mind. The very sight of the poor household with all its anxieties, the struggle for existence which was going on, the hopes most likely to produce nothing but disappointment, struck a new chord in her. She was more familiar with the level of commonplace existence on which they were struggling to hold their place than with the soft and costly completeness of life on Lady Randolph’s lines. The outside aspect of the house had carried her back to the Terrace; the busied and somewhat agitated maid who opened the door, unaccustomed to such fine company, the flutter and flurry of expectation throughout the house, no one knowing who it was who had come, but all expecting some event out of the way, had made Lucy smile with sympathy, yet blush to think that such an insignificant personage as herself was the stranger received with so much excitement. So far Lucy knew and recognized the state of feeling in the house; but she had never known that struggle of poverty which was everywhere visible, and it went to her heart. This occupied all her thoughts as she went back; and when she got home she disappeared into her own room for a long time, somewhat to the surprise of Lady Randolph, who, as so often happens, was specially disposed for her young companion’s society. Lucy sent even Jock away. She dispatched him with Elizabeth, her maid, to buy something he would want before going to school; and bringing her little old-fashioned desk to her little sitting-room, sat down with it before the fire. It was a cold day, though bright, and Lucy thought, with pain that was almost personal, of the sputtering of the newly lighted fire in Mrs. Russell’s cold drawing-room, and of all the signs of poverty about. Why should people be so different? She opened the desk, which was full of little relics of her girlhood; little rubbishy drawings which the other girls, at Mrs. Stone’s, had done for her; and even little French exercises and virtuous essays of her own, all religiously put away. The desk was a very common little article, opening in two unequal divisions, so as to form a blue velvet slope on which to write; a thing much more adapted to be laid out upon one of the little tables in the Terrace drawing-room than to have a place here, where everything was so much more refined.