This feeling humiliated and depressed her, she could not tell how or why. Had they been living in a little cottage in the country, had they been quite poor, so that she should have had homely services to do for them, help to give, that would have been practicable; but to come back to the Terrace with her maid, and her horse, and her groom, and her new habits, to have all the indulgences without any of the graces of existence! Lucy sat sadly in the pink room, all newly bedizened and fine, dressed out by ignorance and kindness for her pleasure, but not pleasing her at all, and pondered, dreary and down-hearted. Was it possible that papa himself had not understood? that he did not know what the real differences were, but had made to himself some picture of extravagant splendor on the one side, to be tempered by the Fords and their respectable parlor on the other? Alas! Lucy felt more and more, as she reflected, that poor papa did not understand. It made her heart sore to sit in the place where he had sat, and to contemplate this, and to feel that perhaps, as Sir Thomas had said, to follow out all those regulations of his, which she had thought a happiness and consolation, might turn out nothing less than a bondage. Everything seemed somewhat blank before her, as she sat thus solitary. She knew the routine so well, there was no margin of the unexpected, no novelty to carry her on. She had been so deep in thought that she had not felt a pull at her dress several times repeated. At last Jock could have patience no longer. “I say,” he cried, looking up from his old position upon the great white rug, “Lucy, it is not any good to think.” Lucy was not greatly given to that exercise of thinking, and, to tell the truth, she had not found it to be of very much use. “What makes you say so, Jock?” “Oh, because I have tried--often,” said the little fellow; “before we went away from here, and after, when I went to school. It’s no good, you never find out anything; you wonder and wonder, but you never know any better. Do you think now,” said Jock, with a gleam of moisture in his eyes, “that _he_ ever sees us now, or hears what we are talking about? I wonder--often--” “I--hope so, Jock,” said Lucy; but as she remembered what she had just been thinking she faltered a little, and was not so sure that this was desirable, as in the abstract it seemed to be. “I wonder,” said the little boy--thoughts such as had filled her mind had perhaps been vaguely floating across his firmament also. “I wonder--if he would miss his funny old table and his big blue paper if he were to come back now.” “He has now something better; we will not think of that any longer,” said Lucy, drying her wet eyes. “But we have got to think of it,” said Jock, reflectively contradicting himself; “that is funny, everything is funny. There is Aunty Ford at the foot of the stairs calling us to go down to tea.” CHAPTER XXX. HOME AND FRIENDS.