CHAPTER LXXV
"I don't know what to think of it, Kitty. What do you think?"
"I think you've been playing with fire, dear. With the divine fire. It's the most dangerous of all, and you've got your little fingers burnt."
"Like Horace. He once said the burnt critic dreads the divine fire. I'm not a critic."
"That you most certainly are not."
"Still I used to understand him; and now I can't. I can't make it out at all."
"There's only one thing," said Kitty, musing till an inspiration came. "You haven't seen him for more than three years, and you can't tell what may have happened in between. He may have got entangled with another woman."
Kitty would not have hazarded this conjecture if she had not believed it plausible. But she dwelt on it with a beneficent intention. No other theory, she opined, would so effectually turn and rout the invading idea of Keith Rickman.
Kitty was for once mistaken in her judgement, not having all the evidence before her. The details which would have thrown light on the situation were just those which Lucia preferred to keep to herself. All that the benevolent Kitty had achieved was to fill her friend's mind with a new torment. Lucia had dreaded Rickman's coming; she had lost all sense of security in his presence. Still she had understood him. And now she felt that her very understanding was at fault; that something troubled the fine light she had always viewed him in. Was it possible that she had never really understood?
Close upon Kitty's words there came back to her the tilings that Edith had said of him, that Horace had hinted; things that he had confessed to her himself. Was it possible that he was still that sort of man, the sort that she had vowed she would never marry? He was not bad; she could not think of him as bad; but was he good? Was he like her cousin Horace? No; certainly there was not the smallest resemblance between him and Horace. With Horace she had always felt—in one way—absolutely secure. If she had ever been uncertain it had not been with this obscure inexplicable dread.