"It is I who ought to be, and am very much, obliged to you, Miss Somes," he said, "for you have made one part of my lonely drive very pleasant. I hope you won't be any the worse for your wetting."
"Oh, but I am as dry as a bone—and so is Jenny," said Lucy, blushing still more. "Good-by—and you will not forget the roof?"
"No, no," he said; "but I must come and see it myself."
He sat bolt upright in the cart, watching them as they ran along the road shining with the rain, and a strange feeling took possession of him. How lonely he had been before he saw them! How lonely all his life was! He was rich, fearfully rich, and yet there was not a streak of sunshine in his life. His love for Leslie Lisle had clouded it over as with a pall. Oh! why had the fates dealt with him so unkindly? Why had he not given his heart to some girl like the one who had just left him—one who would have returned his love, and borne for him the sweet name of—wife?
For the first time in his life Ralph Duncombe found himself thinking tenderly and wistfully of some other woman than Leslie Lisle.
He thought of her several times the next day. Her sweet girlish face came between him and a most important letter he was writing; and once during the morning his chief clerk came in and found him—the great city man—sitting with his head leaning on his hands and his eyes fixed vacantly on the window.
When Saturday came around again he remembered that he must go round to White Place to see Lady Eleanor. He had the horse harnessed, and drove along the road, light now with the autumn sunshine, and every inch of the way he thought of Lucy. When, in the afternoon, he reached the corner where he had set her and Jenny down, he pulled up, stared straight in front of him for a moment, then suddenly turned the corner and drove to the school, and his heart beat as it had not beaten since he said good-by to Leslie as he saw Lucy's girlish figure in the garden. She wore a plain cotton frock; a big sun hat, much battered and sunburned, was on her head, and the prettiest and most useless of rakes in her hand. She almost dropped this apology for a tool when she saw him, and the color ran up her cheeks as she came to the gate.
"You have come to see the roof!" she said. "That is kind of you."
"Yes, I have come to see the roof!" he said.
He had forgotten all about it; but he could scarcely say he had come to see her.