It was a hard question to answer; Lucy could not have answered it if she would. How could she tell—she who had never been tried—to what great occasion she might rise? She might be a heroine yet, though she didn't look like one, sitting there weeping and wringing her hands.
'You will not fail him now; remember his future is in your hands. He will do great things with a woman by his side to encourage him to noble aims, to fire him with noble ambitions. Oh, you do not know what your love will do for him! He will have a great future with you by his side.'
Still Lucy moaned and wrung her hands.
'I shall be always afraid,' she said; 'I shall never feel safe. I shall always be thinking day and night of—of what may happen.'
'It will be your own fault if it happens. It is only your love that will keep him; if that should fail, God help him!'
'I am such a poor little thing!' she moaned.
While she was sitting weeping there, Pamela came in, and Lucy jumped up and brushed the tears from her eyes, and puckered her little level brows, and tried to look as if she hadn't been crying. She forgot all about the message she had to give Pamela, and when the sister and brother were talking she slipped out of the room.
'What's she crying about?' Pamela asked him as Lucy closed the door behind her. 'Has anything happened to that—that Mr. Edgell? or is the Master worse?'
'The Master is no worse; but Mrs. Rae is ill, very ill,' Eric answered. He was not at all disposed to talk of Wyatt Edgell's love for Lucy to his agnostic sister.
'And Mr. Edgell, has he been having another attack? Has he been attempting suicide again?'