“I--will go, if you please, and wait for Jock in the street,” was all she found herself able to say. And just then the voices of the children, to her great relief, were audible outside. Lucy hurried away, feeling for the moment more miserable than she had ever been in her life before. There were but three little boys now, and Mary, who had come in with them, was standing a little in advance, listening, with an anxious face, to the sound of the voices in the drawing-room. Mary was hostile, too; she looked at Lucy with defiant eyes. “Oh, is it really you, at last, Miss Trevor?” she said. Poor Lucy felt her heart swell with the sting of so much unkindness. She cried when Jock rushed forward and threw himself upon her. “You are the same at least,” she said, with a sob, as she kissed him. “May he come out with me? for I can not stay here any longer.” The other girl, who did not know the meaning of all this, was shaken out of her sullenness by the threatening of another calamity. Mary had nothing to do with the quarrel. She grew, if possible, a little more pale. “Do you mean that he is to go--for good?” she said, looking wistfully at the diminished band, only three, and there had been ten! It was all she could do to keep from crying, too. “I have always tried to do the best I could for him,” she said. CHAPTER XXVI. A RECEPTION OF A DIFFERENT KIND. Lucy rode home without waiting for Sir Thomas, with a heavy heart. She said very little when she got back. To Lady Randolph’s questions she had scarcely anything to reply. In Lady Randolph’s eyes the chief person to be considered was Lucy, whose name had been so cruelly brought before the public. When it did occur to her that the poor young author might be cast down by the cruel comments upon his first production, it is to be feared that the verdict “served him right,” was the one that occurred first to her mind. Only in the course of the afternoon, when Lucy’s increased gravity had made a distinct impression upon her, did she express any feeling on this point. “Of course I am sorry for his mother,” she said; “a silly woman, no energy, no resource in her; but it will wound her of course. How are they getting on with their school? That little girl, Mary, that was the only one that seemed to me to be good for anything. Are they getting on any better with their school?” Lucy shook her head. She could not muster courage to speak, the tears were in her eyes.