The strange situation which had arisen did not pass wholly without outside remark. Lucy Kemp at first came daily—indeed, sometimes twice a day—to sit with Barbara and to read to her; and though at those times Berwick kept out of the Queen's Room, there came a moment in Barbara's illness when she perceived, with a sad feeling of humiliation, that Lucy's visits were being curtailed, also that she never came to the Priory unaccompanied.
To the girl herself her father's sudden stern objection to her daily visits to Mrs. Rebell had been inexplicable,—even more so her mother's refusal to discuss the question. Then a word said before her by Mrs. Boringdon, a question put to Oliver as to James Berwick's prolonged stay at Chancton, had partly opened Lucy's eyes.
"Do you dislike my going to see Mrs. Rebell because Mr. Berwick is there?"
With some hesitation Mrs. Kemp answered her: "Yes, my dear, that is the reason your father does not wish you to go to the Priory so often."
And then Lucy had turned and asked one of those questions, difficult to answer truthfully to one who, even if in her parents' eyes a child, was yet a woman grown: "Mother, I want to ask you something. Is it very wrong, always wrong, for a woman to like another man better than she likes her husband? How can she help it if the man to whom she is married is such a man as Mr. Pedro Rebell seems to be?"
But Mrs. Kemp answered with unwonted decision and sharpness: "There is a moment—there is always a moment—when the matter is in a woman's own hands and conscience. And in any case, Lucy, two wrongs don't make a right!"
And with this the girl had to be content, but the question made Mrs. Kemp more than ever determined to discontinue her daughter's growing intimacy with poor Barbara. First Oliver Boringdon, and then James Berwick,—this Mrs. Rebell must indeed be an unfit friend for her little Lucy!
To Madame Sampiero, who lay at the other end of the corridor out of which opened the Queen's Room, the doctor would sometimes declare, "I've little mind for the part I am playing." But when she answered, with perplexity and fear in her large blue eyes, "Why then do you play it?" he would content himself with shrugging his shoulders, and muttering between his teeth, "Because I'm a sentimental old fool!"
But, whatever the reason, so well had Doctor McKirdy managed the extraordinary situation, that not till Mrs. Rebell was promoted to getting up and coming downstairs, did the long hours spent by Berwick in her company provoke the kind of gossip which had finally reached the ears of Mrs. Boringdon. Even then what was repeated had been said in jest. Was it likely, so the humble gossips of Chancton would have declared, that such a gentleman as Mr. Berwick would fancy a lady who was by all accounts half burnt to a cinder!