"You will write, will you not?"
"I suppose I must. Yet it is a difficult letter for me to answer."
"Could not you just say 'I will do what I can?'"
"Which is absolutely nothing—unless Maurice should really pay us a visit here, a thing not likely at present."
So the conversation ended without any satisfaction to Lucia. Nay, all her previous days had been happy compared to this one. She was devoured now, by a restless, jealous curiosity about that Miss Landor whom Mr. Leigh feared—she constantly found her thoughts reverting to this subject, however she might try to occupy them with others, and the tumult of her mind reacted upon her nerves. She could scarcely bear to sit still. It rained all afternoon and evening, and she could not go out, so that in the usual course of events she would have read aloud to her mother part of the time, and for the other part sat by the window with her crochet in her hand, but to-day she wandered about perpetually. She even opened the piano and began to sing her merriest old songs, but that soon ceased. She found the novel they were reading insufferably stupid, and took up a volume of Shakespeare for refreshment, but it opened naturally to the 'Merchant of Venice,' and, to the page where Portia says:—
"Though for myself alone,
I would not be ambitious in my wish,
To wish myself much better, yet for you
I would be trebled twenty times myself;
A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich;
That only to stand high on your account,
I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends,
Exceed account."
She shut the book—yes, this was a true woman, who for true love thought herself and all she possessed too little to give in return; but for the little, foolish, blind souls that could not see till too late, what was true love, she was no fit company.
The evening passed on wearily, and Mrs. Costello, who had her own share of disquiet also, though it was mixed with a little amusement at the impetuosity of these young people, who were so dear to her and so troublesome, did very little in the way of consolation.
Next day, the weather had cleared again, and was very lovely. In the afternoon, Lucia persuaded Mrs. Costello to go with her to the beach. There they got chairs, and sat for a long while enjoying the gay, and often comical, scene round them. Numbers of people were bathing, and beside the orthodox bathers, there was a party of little boys wading about with bare legs, and playing all sorts of pranks in the water.
A little way to the left of where they sat, there was a curious kind of wooden pier, which ran far away out into the sea and terminated in a small square wooden building. The whole thing was raised on piles about five or six feet above the present level of the water which flowed underneath it. The pier itself, in fact, was only a narrow bridge or footpath railed partly on one side only, partly on both, and with an oddly unsafe and yet tempting look about it. Lucia had been attracted by it before, and she drew her mother's attention to it now—