"Yes. Say that we are in great need of a friend."
Lucia began. She found it much more difficult than she had done the other night, when she wrote those few impetuous lines which had been afterwards torn up.
"Dear Maurice," she said, "mamma tells me to write to you, and say that something has happened which has frightened her very much, and that we are in great need of a friend. Will you keep your promise, and come to us?"
This was what she showed to her mother. When Mrs. Costello had approved of it, she wrote a few words more.
"I want to ask you to forgive me. I don't deserve it, but I am so unhappy.
"Yours affectionately,
"Lucia."
She hesitated a little how to sign herself, but finally wrote just what she had been accustomed to put to all her little notes written to Maurice during his absences from Cacouna in the old days.
When the letter had been sealed and sent off by Madame Everaert's servant to the post-office, they began to feel that all they could do for the present was done. Mrs. Costello lay still on her sofa, without having strength or energy to talk, and Lucia took her never-finished crochet, and sat in her old place by the window.
But very soon it grew too dark to work. The Place was lighted, and alive with people passing to and fro. The windows of the guard house opposite were brilliant, and from those of a café on the same side as Madame Everaert's there shone out, half across the square, a broad line of light. In this way, at two places, the figures of those who moved about the pavement on each side of the Place, were very plainly visible; even the faces of some could be distinguished. Lucia watched these people to-night with a new interest. Every time the strong glare fell upon a shabby slouching figure, or on a poorly dressed man who wanted the air of being a Frenchman, she thought, "Is that Bailey?" When the lamp came in, Mrs. Costello had fallen asleep, so Lucia turned it down low, and still sat at the window. The light on the tower shone out clear and bright—above it the stars looked pale, but the sky was perfectly serene. Maurice, if he came soon, had every prospect of a fair passage. "And he will come," she thought to herself, "even if he is really too much vexed with me to forgive me, he will come for mamma's sake."
All next day they both kept indoors. Lucia tried to persuade her mother to drive out into the country, but even for this Mrs. Costello had not courage. At the same time she seemed to be losing all sense of security in the house. She fancied she had not sufficiently impressed on Father Paul the importance of not betraying her in any way to Bailey. She wished to write and remind him of this, but she dared not lest her note should fall into wrong hands. Then she thought of asking him to visit her, but hesitated also about that till it was too late. In short, was in a perfectly unreasonable and incapable condition—fear had taken such hold of her in her weak state of health that Lucia began to think it would end in nervous fever. With her the dread of Bailey began to be quite lost in apprehension for her mother, and her own affairs had to be put altogether on one side to make room for these new anxieties.
In the afternoon of that day Mrs. Costello suddenly roused herself from a fit of thought.