"She may hurt Lydia."
"Lydia!"
The word leaped out of some deep responsiveness she did not understand.
"Don't you know how much they are together? They go driving."
"Well, what's that? Madame Beattie's a good old sport. She won't harm Lydia."
But instead of keeping up his work, he went on to the house with her. Miss Amabel would not go in and when he had said good-bye to her—affectionately, charmingly, as if to assure her that, after all, she needn't fear him even with Weedie who wasn't important enough to slay—he entered the house in definite search of Lydia. He went to the library, and there she was, in the window niche, where she sat to watch him. Day by day Lydia sat there when he was in the garden and she was not busy and he knew it was a favourite seat of hers for, glancing over his rows of corn, he could see the top of her head bent over a book. He did not know how long she pored over a page with eyes that saw him, a wraith of him hovering over the print, nor that when their passionate depths grew hungrier for the actual sight of him, how she threw one glance at his working figure and bent to her book again. As he came suddenly in upon her she sprang up and faced him, the book closed upon a trembling finger.
"Lydia," said he, "you're great chums with Madame Beattie, aren't you?"
Lydia gave a little sigh of a relief she hardly understood. What she expected him to ask her she did not know, but there were strange warm feelings in her heart she would not have shown to Jeff. She could have shown them before that minute—when he had said the thing that ought not even to be remembered: "I only love you." Before that, she thought, she had been quite simply his sister. Now she was a watchful servitor of a more fervid sort. Jeffrey thought she was afraid of being scolded about her queer old crony.
"Sit down," he said. "There's nothing to be ashamed of in liking Madame Beattie. You do like her, don't you?"
"Oh, yes," said Lydia. "I like her very much."