“Ah!” said Lady Randolph. Lucy’s emotion had a very disturbing effect upon her: but it moved her not to compassion for Mrs. Russell, but to suspicion against Bertie. “I never thought it would come to much,” she said. “It seems so easy to start anything like that. They had their furniture, and what more did they want? Indian children! one would think it rained Indian children; every poor lady with no money thinks she can manage to make a living out of them--without calculating that everybody in India, or almost everybody, has poor relations of their own.” But she was kind, notwithstanding her severity. There are few people who are not more or less kind to absolute suffering. Though she thought Mrs. Russell silly, and considered that her son had been served rightly (if cruelly), and was impatient of the foolish hopes on which their little establishment had been founded, still she could not be satisfied to leave the poor lady whom she had known in her better days to want. “I will speak to Tom,” she said. “If Bertie could but get some situation, far better than writing nonsensical books, something in the Customs, or perhaps the post-office. I believe there are a great many young men of good families in places like that--where he could get a settled income, and be able to help his mother.” Lucy made no reply to this suggestion. She brightened a little in the evening, when Sir Tom came in bringing all his news with him; but she was not herself. When she was safe in her room at night, she cried plentifully, like a child as she was, over her failure. Perhaps her heart had never been so sore. Sorrow, such as she had felt for her father, is a different thing--there had been no cross or complication in that; but in this all her life seemed to be compromised. This dearest legacy that had been left her, the power of making others happy, was it to be a failure in her hands? She had never contemplated such a probability. In all the books she had read (and these are a girl’s only medium of knowledge) there had been no such incident. There had been indeed records of profuse gratitude; followed by unkindness and indifference; but these had never alarmed Lucy. Gratitude had been the only thing she feared, and that the recipients of the bounty should forget it was her chief hope. But this unexpected rebuff threw Lucy down to the earth from those heights of happy and simple beneficence. Was it her fault? she asked herself; had she offered it unkindly, shown any ungenerous feeling? She examined every word she had said--at least as far as she could recollect them, but she had been so much agitated, so overwhelmed by the excitement and passion of the others, that she could not recollect much that she had said. All night long in her dreams she was pleading with people who would not take her gifts, and blaming herself for not knowing how to offer them. And when she woke in the morning, Was it my fault? was the first question that occurred to her.