'Not unless you loved him very much,' Nurse Brannan said promptly. She could understand a girl doing a great deal for a man she loved.
'No—o—o,' Lucy said hesitatingly. 'I don't think I ought to marry him even then. One never knows what he may do. I should never feel safe.'
If the room had not been quite dark, Lucy would have seen that Nurse Brannan was smiling with a contemptuous sort of pity; but, whatever she felt, she only soothed and petted the weeping girl as if she had been a little child.
'You are quite right, dear,' she said; 'one never knows what such a man will do when there is no influence strong enough to restrain him. I don't think you would be strong enough to hold him back. He ought to marry a woman with a large nature, who loved him devotedly—and I think he would tax her devotion to the uttermost.'
Lucy turned to her pillow with a sigh.
'Ah!' she murmured, 'it is the old story. I am a poor thing with a small soul!' Still, she was helped and comforted.
Eric Gwatkin came over to the lodge the next morning and asked for Lucy. He was charged with a message of condolence from her lover. She saw him in the long gallery among the pictures of the old Masters. It was such a grave and stately place, there was no room for sentiment here. She knew the trial had come, but Nurse Brannan had helped her to meet it.
She looked such a white, weeping little Lucy as she came down the long gallery to meet him. She seemed to have grown so small, to have shrunk into herself with this sorrow that had fallen upon her, that Eric Gwatkin hesitated to deliver the message that had been committed to him. She had been so sorely tried within the last two days, how could he add to her pain? He would much rather have taken her in his arms and comforted her, and offered her their safe, sure shelter from all the storms of life. He would have given the world to have the right to take her in his arms, but he had to deliver his message.
Perhaps Lucy would have preferred it if he had. She wanted to be loved and comforted, and, above all things, to be safe.