"No, I was not with her," he answered. "I wanted to go, but she would not let me."
"Are you sure, then, that she was not with Geoffrey Heath?"
"I am sure that she was with him, for they passed me not a half hour ago as I came up."
They had entered the library while he spoke, and crossing to the hearth, where a small fire burned, Lydia looked up at him with her anxious gaze. "I hoped at first that you would gain some influence over her," she said, in a distressed voice, "but it seems now that she is estranged even from you."
"Not estranged, but there is a difference and I am troubled by it. She is young, you see, and I am but a dull and sober companion for her."
She shook her head with the little hopeless gesture which was so characteristic of her. Only yesterday this absence of resolution, the discontented droop of her thin, red lips, had worked him into a feeling of irritation against her. But his vision of her to-day had passed through some softening lens; and he saw her shallowness, her vanity, her lack of passion, as spiritual infirmities which were not less to be pitied than an infirmity of the body.
"The end is not yet, though," he added cheerfully after a moment, "and she will come back to me in time when I am able really to help her."
"Meanwhile is she to be left utterly uncontrolled?"
"Not if we can do otherwise. Only we must go quietly and not frighten her too much."
Again she met his words with the resigned, hopeless movement of her pretty head in its pearl gray bonnet. "I have done all I can," she said, "and it has been worse than useless. Now you must try if your method is better than mine."