“You have a harder lot than ever I thought it, my poor Lucy,” said he, looking into her eyes with an affectionate solicitude. “This is so unlike our old home.”
“Oh, so unlike!” said she; and her lip quivered and her eyes grew glazy.
“And can you bear it, girl? Does it not seem to you like a servitude to put up with such causeless passion, such capricious anger as this?”
She shook her head mournfully, but made no answer.
“If it be your woman's nature enables you to do it, all I can say is, I don't envy you your sex.”
“But, Tom, remember his years,—remember his age.”
“By Jove, he took good care to remind me of my own!—not that he was so far wrong in what he said of me, Lucy. I felt all the while he had 'hit the blot,' and I would have owned it too, if he had n't taken himself off so quickly.”
“If you had, Tom,—if you had said but one word to this purport,—you would have seen how nobly forgiving he could be in an instant.”
“Forgiving,—humph! I don't think the forgiveness was to have come from him.”
“Sir William wishes to speak with you, Miss Lucy,” said the butler, entering hastily.