'I have just come from the lodge,' he said. 'The Master has passed a better night. He has had several hours' sleep.' Lucy looked at him with a question in her eyes that had nothing to do with the Master. 'Why didn't Mr. Edgell come?' she said almost sharply. 'Why did he send you?' Eric couldn't look into her eyes and tell her a fib. They were such clear, straightforward eyes, they seemed to look quite through him. 'Edgell is working for his Tripos,' he said evasively. 'He has only a few days longer before him.' 'He isn't working at this time in the morning?' said Lucy, looking straight at him. He couldn't meet her eyes. He looked up admiringly at the red-brick front of Newnham as if he had never seen it before. 'No,' he said; 'he is not working now--he is----' 'I know what he is, without your trying to shield him,' Lucy interrupted with fine scorn. 'He is lying most likely drunk and incapable on the floor, or he is raving on his bed, and seeing hideous things. Oh, Mr. Gwatkin, what is the good of your friendship if you cannot keep him from this?' Eric hung his head. 'He is beyond my keeping,' he said sadly. 'He is beyond the reach of my poor prayers. God knows I pray for him night and day!' Lucy didn't say that she had been praying for him that very morning, that she had only just got off her knees, and come out in the rain to meet him. 'Will nothing save him?' she said, wringing her hands. 'Yes,' Eric said slowly, looking at her with troubled eyes; 'there is one thing that would save him.' She looked up at him, and their eyes met, and her heart gave a great bound, and something seemed to surge up in her ears, and swim before her eyes, and choke in her throat. She wasn't quite sure for a minute if anything had happened to her; and when her heart beat again, and the wave went back, and the trees and the college ceased to go round, Eric was looking down at her with his troubled eyes, and his weak lips quivering as he spoke. 'The one thing that would save him would entail sacrifice--the sacrifice of a life--and only a noble woman could make it----' 'You mean,' she said, speaking hoarsely--that lump in her throat hadn't gone yet--'you mean that a woman could save him?' 'Yes,' he said, almost with a groan; 'but it would be at her own cost.' 'Not if she loved him?' 'Yes; all the more if she loved him.' Lucy turned away, and the wind got under her umbrella and turned it inside out, and made a diversion. 'There is no other way?' she said, when Eric had brought it back into something like shape, and returned it to her. 'No,' he said, 'there is no other way.' Lucy put down her umbrella--she would battle no more with the storm--and the rain came down in a sheet and wetted her through and through as she walked slowly back to the college.