"No, we mayn't. You've got your death of cold as it is." "I'm not cold, now. I'm warm. Feel my hands." She held them out to him. He did not touch them. But he put his arm round her and raised her to her feet. And they went back together along the narrow Cliff-path. It was dangerous in the perishing light. He took her hands in his now, and led her sidelong. When her feet slipped in the slimy chalk, he held her up with his arm. At the little gate she turned to him. "I was kind to Bunny," she said, "I was really." "I am sure," he said gently, "you are kind to everybody." "That's something, isn't it?" "I'm not sure that it isn't everything." They went up the side of the garden, along the shrubbery, by a path that led to the main entrance of the hotel. A great ring of white light lay on the wet ground before the porch, thrown from the electric lamps within. Mrs. Tailleur stepped back into the darkness by the shrubbery. "Look here," she said, "I'm going in by myself. You are going round another way. You have not seen me. You don't know where I am. You don't know anything about me." "I know," said Lucy, "you are coming in with me." She drew farther back. "I'm not thinking of myself," she said, "I'm thinking of you." She was no longer like a child. Her voice had suddenly grown older. "Are you?" he said. "Then you'll do what I ask you." He held her with his arm and drew her, resisting and unresisting, close to him. "Ah," she cried, "what are you going to do with me?" "I am going," he said, "to take you to my sister." And he went with her, up the steps and into the lighted vestibule, past the hall-porter and the clerk in his bureau and the manager's wife in hers, straight into the lounge, before the Colonel and his wife, and he led her to Jane where she sat in her place beside the hearth. "It isn't half such a bad night as it looks," said he in a clear voice. "Is it, Mrs. Tailleur?" CHAPTER X Five minutes later Lucy was talking to Colonel and Mrs. Hankin, with genial unconcern. They never knew that he knew what they had been saying, or how their tongues had scourged Mrs. Tailleur out into the lash of the rain. They never knew that the young man who conversed with them so amiably was longing to take the Colonel by his pink throat and throttle him, nor that it was only a higher chivalry that held him from this disastrous deed. The Colonel merely felt himself in the presence of an incomparable innocence; but whether it was Lucy who was innocent, or Mrs. Tailleur, or the two of them together, he really could not say. Upstairs, in Mrs. Tailleur's bedroom, Jane Lucy was talking to Mrs. Tailleur. They were sitting by the hearth while Kitty, clothed in warm garments, shook out her drenched hair before the fire. She had just told Jane how Miss Keating had left her, and she had become tearful again over the telling. "Need you mind so much? Is she worth it?" said Jane, very much as Robert had said.