She looked piteously at her hand, wet with a hero's tears, and for the second time to-day her own began to gush. She felt a need of being alone. She wanted to think on what she had done. She would hide in the garden. She ran down the steps; lo! there was Mr. Hardie coming up the gravel-walk. She uttered a little cry of impatience, and dashed impetuously into the hot-house, driving the half-open door before her with her person as well as her arm.
A scream of terror and pain issued from behind it, with a crash of pottery.
Lucy wheeled round at the sound, and there was her aunt, flattened against the flower-frame.
Lucy stood transfixed.
But soon her look of surprise gave way to a frown; ay! and a somber one.
CHAPTER XVI.
THAT ready-minded lady extricated herself from the pots, and wriggled out of the moral situation. “I was a listener, dear! an unwilling listener; but now I do not regret it. How nobly you behaved!” and with this she came at her with open arms, crying, “My own dear niece.”
Her own dear niece recoiled with a shiver, and put up both her hands as a shield.
“Oh, don't touch me, please. I never heard of a lady listening!!!!”