“May I know it?” she timidly said.
“No, Lucy. If I could speak it, it would only give you pain; but it is of a private nature. Possibly it may be averted; it is at present a suspected dread, not a confirmed one. Should it become confirmed, you will learn it in common with all the world.”
She looked up at him puzzled; sympathy in her mantling blush, in her soft dark, earnest eyes. He could not avoid contrasting that truthful face with another’s frivolous one: and I can’t help it if you blame him. He did his best to shake off the feeling, and looked down at her with a careless smile.
“Don’t let it give you concern, Lucy. My troubles must rest upon my own head.”
“Have you seen any more of that man who was watching? Roy.”
“No. But I don’t believe now that it was Roy. He strongly denies it, and I have had my suspicicions diverted to another quarter.”
“To one who may be equally wishing to do you harm?”
“I cannot say. If it be the party I—I suspect, he may deem that I have done him harm.”
“You!” echoed Lucy. “And have you?”
“Yes. Unwittingly. It seems to be my fate, I think, to work harm upon—upon those whom I would especially shield from it.”
Did he allude to her? Lucy thought so, and the flush on her cheeks deepened. At that moment the rain began to pour down heavily. They were then passing the thicket of trees where those adventurous ghost hunters had taken up their watch a few nights previously, in view of the willow-pond. Lucy stepped underneath their branches.
“Now,” said Lionel, “should you have done well to accept my offer of Verner’s Pride as a shelter, or not?”
“It may only be a passing storm,” observed Lucy. “The rain then was nothing.”
Lionel took her parasol and shook the wet off it. He began to wonder how Lucy would get home. No carriage could be got to that spot, and the rain, coming down now, was not, in his opinion, a passing storm.
“Will you promise to remain here, Lucy, while I get an umbrella?” he presently asked.
“Why! where could you get an umbrella from?”
“From Hook’s, if they possess such a thing. If not, I can get one from Broom’s.”
“But you would get so wet going for it!”
Lionel laughed as he went off.
“I don’t wear a silk dress; to be scolded for it, if it gets spoiled.”
Not ten steps had he taken, however, when who should come striding through an opening in the trees, but Jan. Jan was on his way from Hook’s cottage, a huge brown cotton umbrella over his head, more useful than elegant.
“What, is that you, Miss Lucy! Well, I should as soon have thought of seeing Mrs. Peckaby’s white donkey!”
“I am weather-bound, Jan,” said Lucy. “Mr. Verner was about to get me an umbrella.”
“To see if I could get one,” corrected Lionel. “I question if the Hooks possess such a commodity.”
“Not they,” cried Jan. “The girl’s rather better,” added he, unceremoniously. “She may get through it now: at least there’s a shade of a chance. You can have my umbrella, Miss Lucy.”
“Won’t you let me go with you, Jan?” she asked.
“Oh, I can’t stop to take you to Deerham Court,” was Jan’s answer, given with his accustomed plainness. “Here, Lionel.”
He handed over the umbrella, and was walking off.
“Jan, Jan, you will get wet,” said Lucy.
It amused Jan.
“A wetting more or less is nothing to me,” he called out, striding on.
“Will you stay under shelter a few minutes yet, and see whether it abates?” asked Lionel.
Lucy looked up at the skies, stretching her head beyond the trees to do so.
“Do you think it will abate?” she rejoined.
“Honestly, to confess it, I think it will get worse,” said Lionel. “Lucy, you have thin shoes on! I did not see that until now.”
“Don’t you tell Lady Verner,” replied Lucy, with the pretty dependent manner which she had brought from school with her, and which she probably would never lose. “She would scold me for walking out in them.”
Lionel smiled, and held the great umbrella—large enough for a carriage—close to the trees, that it might shelter her as she came forth.
“Take my arm, Lucy.”
She hesitated for a single moment—a hesitation so temporary that any other than Lionel could not have observed it, and then took his arm. And again they walked on in silence. In passing down Clay Lane—the way Lionel took—Mrs. Peckaby was standing at her door.
“On the look out for the white donkey, Mrs. Peckaby?” asked Lionel.
The husband, inside, heard the words and flew into a tantrum.
“She’s never on the look out for nothing else, sir: asking pardon for saying it to you.”
Mrs. Peckaby clasped her hands together.
“It’ll come!” she murmured. “Sometimes, sir, when my patience is well nigh exhausted, I has a vision of the New Jerusalem in the night, and is revived. It’ll come, sir, the quadruple ’ll come!”
“I wonder,” laughed Lucy, as they walked on, “whether she will go on to the end of her life expecting it?”
“If her husband will allow her,” answered Lionel. “But by what I have heard since I came home, his patience is—as she says by her own with reference to the white ‘quadruple’—well nigh exhausted.”
“He told Decima, the other day, that he was sick of the theme and of her folly, and he wished the New Jerusalem had her and the white donkey together. Here we are!” added Lucy, as they came in front of Deerham Court. “Lionel, please, let me go in the back way—Jan’s way. And then Lady Verner will not see me. She will say I ought not to have come through the rain.”
