Lydia turned away from him, and he could fancy the bright tears dropping as she walked. "Oh, dear!" he heard her say. "Oh, dear!"
"Lydia!" he called, in an impatience of tenderness and misery. "Come back here. Don't you know I'd do anything on earth I could for you? But there's nothing I can do. You wouldn't ask a lame man to dance. There! that shows you. When it comes to dancing you can understand. I'm a cripple, Lydia. Don't you see?"
She had turned obediently, and now she smeared the tears away with one small hand.
"You don't understand," she said. "You don't understand a thing. We've thought of it all this time, Anne and I, how you'd come out and be proved not guilty—"
"But, Lydia," he said gravely, "I was guilty. And besides being guilty of things the courts condemned me for, I was guilty of things I had to condemn myself for afterward. I wasn't a criminal merely. I was a waster and a fool."
"Yes," said Lydia, looking at him boldly, "and if you were guilty who made you so? Who pushed you on?"
She had never entirely abandoned her theory of Reardon. He and Esther, in her suspicion, stood side by side. Looking at him, she rejoiced in what she thought his confirmation. The red had run into his face and he looked at her with brightened eyes.
"You don't know anything about it," he said harshly. "I did what I did. And I got my medicine. And if there's a decent impulse left in me to-day, it was because I got it."
Lydia walked away through the soft dirt and felt as if she were dancing. He had looked guilty when she had asked him who pushed him on. He and she both knew it was Esther, and a little more likelihood of Madame Beattie's blackguarding Esther in print must rouse him to command the situation.
Jeffrey finished his row, and then hurried into the house. It was the late afternoon, and he went to his room and dressed, in time for supper. Lydia, glancing at him as he left the table, thought exultantly: "I've stirred him up, at least. Now what is he going to do?"