"Lucy, I find that our coming here has turned you out of your room," he gravely said. "I should earnestly have protested against it, had I known what was going to be done."
"Should you?" said she, shaking her head quite saucily. "We should not have listened to you."
"We! Whom does the 'we' include?"
"Myself and Decima. We planned everything. I like the room I have now, quite as much as that. It is the room at the end, opposite the one Mrs. Verner is to have for her sitting-room."
"The sitting-room again! What shall you and Decima do without it?" exclaimed Lionel, looking as he felt—vexed.
"If we never have anything worse to put up with than the loss of a sitting-room that was nearly superfluous, we shall not grieve," answered Lucy, with a smile. "How did we do without it before—when you were getting better from that long illness? We had to do without it then."
"I think not, Lucy. So far as my memory serves me, you were sitting in it a great portion of your time—cheering me. I have not forgotten it, if you have."
Neither had she—by her heightened colour.
"I mean that we had to do without it for our own purposes, our drawings and our work. It is but a little matter, after all. I wish we could do more for you and Mrs. Verner. I wish," she added, her voice betraying her emotion, "that we could have prevented your being turned from Verner's Pride."
"Ay," he said, speaking with affected carelessness, and turning about an ornament in his fingers, which he had taken from the mantel-piece, "it is not an every-day calamity."