"The poor child's been made miserable enough by her marriage," Lucinda declared. "And now Lontaine's deserted her she's got nobody left but her people, who were opposed to Harry from the first and were, I haven't the faintest doubt, to a considerable extent responsible for making her life with him the wretched muddle it turned out. If they'd treated Harry half-way decently, when treating him harshly couldn't change the fact that he was Fanny's husband, if they'd interested themselves to give him a chance to make a comfortable living for himself and her, it's more than likely he would never have dreamed of doing anything wrong. Now his troubles have driven him to it, I'm not going to add to Fanny's by bringing him back to the notice of her family branded a thief. Let things alone and they may make up their differences with her...."
"Such magnanimity is costing you a pretty penny," Willis suggested mildly.
"It isn't anything of the sort," Lucinda pointed out with some heat. "Putting Harry Lontaine in a penitentiary won't put back in my pocketbook one cent of the money he made away with. In fact, to do nothing about him is the only inexpensive way to deal with his affairs....
"Besides," she added with a shy, sly twinkle, "whatever this experience has cost me in money, it's taught me something I would never have learned in any other way, something I badly needed to be taught, too."
"And that is——?" Willis prompted.
"Shan't tell you. I'm not sure I'm quite ready to admit all it's taught me, even to myself."
With this she left Willis to his vain surmises, confident that he would aim the shrewdest of them wide of the mark.
Otherwise, she found irritating the open gratification with which Willis took note of Bellamy's neighbourhood and drew an easy inference. But he had the wisdom to refrain from mentioning the possibility he foresaw of such propinquity; and Lucinda was generous enough to imitate this reticence and spare Willis the pain of hopes disabused.
He went his way at length not, everything considered, dissatisfied with the way events, as he read them, were shaping social salvation for the young woman in whom he took an interest so genially paternal.
And Lucinda took leave of him with dewy eyes ... her one true friend....