"What is the matter, Lucy? You are in pain! You have been crying!"
"I slipped and hurt my ankle, Theresa. It was foolish to cry, though. The pain is much less already."
Miss Blake helped her indoors in lofty silence. Anything like the contempt she felt for the weakness of Lucy Andinnian, she perhaps had never felt for any one before in all her life. Not for the weakness of crying at a hurt: though that was more befitting a child than a woman: but for the reprehensible weakness she was guilty of in living on terms of affection with her husband. "Must even sit in a garden arbour together hand in hand, listening to the nightingales," shrieked Miss Blake mentally, with rising hair. "And yet--she knows what I disclosed to her!"
The note was from Mrs. Grey. Had Miss Blake herself presided at its opening, she could not reasonably have found fault with it. Mrs. Grey presented her compliments to Sir Karl Andinnian, and would feel obliged by his calling to see her as soon as convenient, as she wished to speak with him on a little matter of business concerning the house.
There was nothing more. But Karl knew, by the fact of her venturing on the extreme step of writing to the Court, that he was wanted at the Maze for something urgent. It was several days since he had been there: for he could not divest himself of the feeling that some one of these nightly visits of his, more unlucky than the rest, might bring on suspicion and betrayal. To his uneasy mind there was danger in every surrounding object. The very sound of the wind in the trees seemed to whisper it to him as he passed; hovering shades of phantom shape glanced out to his fancy from the hedges.
He stayed a short while pacing his garden, and then went indoors. It was getting dusk. Miss Blake had her things off and was alone in the drawing-room. The tea waited on the table.
"Where's Lucy?" he asked.
"She went to her room to have her ankle seen to. I would have done anything for her, but she declined my services."
Karl knocked at his wife's little sitting-room door, and entered. She was leaning on the window-sill, and said her ankle felt much better
after the warm water, and since Aglaé had bound it up. Karl took her hand.
"We were interrupted, Lucy, when I was asking an important question," he began--"for indeed I think I must have misunderstood you. How does the putting an end to our estrangement lie with me?"