"She at the Maze. She with the angel face." Lucy slightly shivered. For a moment she made no comment. Her face turned ghastly.
"Oh, Lucy, my dear, forgive me!" cried Miss Blake. "Perhaps I have been wrong to tell you; but I cannot bear that you should be so deceived. I went up to London myself this morning after some embroidery silks that I could not get at Basham. Sir Karl and she were in the same train. I saw them get out together at the terminus."
It was cruel to hear and to have to bear; but Lucy said never a word. Her tell-tale face had betrayed her emotion, but she would not let anything else betray it.
"Perhaps both happened to have business in London," she quietly said, when she could trust her voice to be steady. "I am sure Karl went up to go to Plunkett and Plunkett's."
And not another allusion did she make to it. Ringing for Hewitt, she calmly told him his master would not be home: and after that talked cheerfully to Theresa until the evening was over. Miss Blake wondered at her.
Calm before her and the world. But when she got upstairs and was alone in her chamber, all the pent-up anguish broke forth. Her heart seemed breaking; her sense of wrong well nigh overmastered her.
"And it was only on Saturday he vowed to me the sin was all of the past!" she cried. And she lay in torment through the live-long summer's night.
[CHAPTER XX.]
Only one Fly at the Station
The railway station at Basham seemed to be never free from bustle. Besides pertaining to Basham proper, it was the junction for other places. Various lines crossed each other; empty carriages and trolleys of coal stood near; porters and others were always running about.