"I have been at the gate some time," she said. "It is so pleasant out of doors."
"I went to the top of the lane to look for you a long time ago, and saw you coming with, I thought, Mr. Percy."
"Yes. He met me. Mamma, I want to tell you something about—"
Mrs. Costello laid down her work.
"What?" she said almost sharply, as something in her child's soft caressing attitude, and broken words struck her with a new terror.
Lucia slid down to the floor, half kneeling at her mother's feet. "About myself—and him," she murmured.
Mrs. Costello raised her daughter's face to the light, and looked at it closely with an almost bitter scrutiny.
"Child," she said, "I thought you would have been safe from this. I did him injustice, it seems."
A new instinct in Lucia's mind roused her against her mother. She let her clinging arms fall, and raised her head.
"I do not understand you, mother," she answered, and half rose from where she had been kneeling.