"I'm so sorry, but I think I must go. I can't leave Lady Adela if things are really difficult. I'll come this afternoon, shall I? and we might go over the dance——"
Rachel had been thinking; she looked up sharply and stared at Lizzie, staring as though she had been some stranger whom she saw for the first time.
"Yes—Come to the Chinese room at four, will you? We'll have tea up there."
"Yes," said Lizzie, "at four."
They were both of them aware that something, now quite irrevocable, had been settled by these words.
There was a little old library up in one of the towers, and there Lizzie went. She had a desperate need of some place where, during the next hour, she might think and decide upon some plan. The room had little diamond-paned windows that looked down, on one side, over the courtyard, and on the other over the garden and the Downs. The shelves went from ceiling to floor and were filled with books that dimly shone with their old gold and were dusky in their rich, faded bindings.
It was very seldom that anyone came here; Lizzie was quite alone as, perched up in one of the deep-seated windows, she looked down at the garden, saw the stone gate with the solitary gryphon, watched the swiftly fading afternoon light fill the green lawn as a pot is filled with water.
Even now, early though it was, the little room was growing dark.
She strove now, resolutely, to discipline her mind. Although the very thought of Francis Breton now shamed her, it was for him that she must care. "Poor dear," he was even now, in her heart. "Foolish, indiscreet—must plunge from one mess into another, needs someone—Oh, so dreadfully—to help him out."
Her hostility to Rachel did not prevent her from feeling that here was someone very young, terribly inexperienced, most unhappily impulsive—the very last in the world to prevent Breton from having another catastrophe as bad as the early ones.