Lucy stooped down to pick a mushroom, and laid it aside ready to retrieve as she came back from her walk, for Mrs Alleyne approved of a dish for breakfast. "Why, at the end of a year it would be horrible," cried Lucy, with emphasis. "Mrs Rolph! What would be the use of being married, if you were miserable, as I'm sure she would be." "It isn't dishonourable; and if it is, I don't mind. I know he is beginning to worship her, and it's as plain as can be that she likes to sit and listen to him, and all he says about the stars. Why, she seems to grow and alter every day, and to become wiser, and to take more interest in everything he says and does." "There, I don't care," she panted, half-tearfully, as she picked another mushroom; and, as if addressing someone who had had spoken chidingly, "I can't help it; he is my own dear brother, and I will help him as much as I can. Dishonourable? Not it. It is right, poor fellow! Why, she has come like so much sunshine in his life, and it is as plain as can be to see that she is gradually beginning to know what love really is." As these thoughts left her heart, she looked guiltily round, but there was no one listening--nothing to take her attention, but a couple of glistening, wet, and silvery-looking mushrooms in the grass hard by. "It's very dreadful of me to be thinking like this," she said to herself, as she finished culling the mushrooms, and began to make her way back to the road, "but I can't help it. I love Glynne, and I won't see my own brother made miserable, if I can do anything to make him happy. It's quite dreadful the way things are going, and dear Sir John ought to be ashamed of himself. I declare--Oh! how you made me start!" This was addressed to wet-coated, dissipated rabbit, with a tail like a tuft of white cotton, which little animal started up from its hiding-place at her very feet, and went bounding and scuffling off amongst the heather and furze. "I wish, oh, how I wish that things would go right," cried Lucy, with tears in her eyes. "I wish I could do something to make Glynne see that he thinks ten times more about his nasty races and matches than he does about her. I don't believe he loves her a bit. It's shameful. He's a beast!" There was another pause, during which the larks went on singing, the wood-pigeon cooed, and there was a pleasant twittering in the nearest plantation. "Poor Glynne! when she might be so happy with a man who really loves her, but who would die sooner than own to it. Oh, dear me! I wish a dreadful war would break out, and Captain Rolph's regiment be ordered out to India, and the Indians would kill him and eat him, or take him prisoner--I don't care what, so long as they didn't let him come back any more, and--"