'Ah! but what I can't understand,' said Fioravanti, 'is how Mrs. Burgoyne allowed it. She ought to have given the book another direction—and she could. She is an extremely clever woman! She knows that caricature is not argument.'
'But what has happened to Mrs. Burgoyne?' said the Marchesa to Lucy, throwing up her hands, 'Such a change! I was so distressed—'
'You think she looks ill?' said Lucy quickly.
Her troubled eyes sought those kind ones looking down upon her almost in appeal. Instinctively the younger woman, far from home and conscious of a hidden agony of feeling, threw herself upon the exquisite maternity that breathed from the elder. 'Oh! if I could tell you!—if you could advise me!' was the girl's unspoken cry.
'She looks terribly ill—to me,' said the Marchesa, gravely. 'And the winter had done her so much good. We all loved her here. It is deplorable. Perhaps the hill climate has been too cold for her, Mademoiselle?'
* * * * *
Lucy walked hurriedly back to the lawn to rejoin her companions. The flood of misery within made movement the only relief. Some instinct of her own came to the aid of the Marchesa's words, helped them to sting all the more deeply. She felt herself a kind of murderer.
Suddenly as she issued blindly from the tangle of the rose-garden she came upon Eleanor Burgoyne talking gaily, surrounded by a little knot of people, mostly older men, who had found her to-day, as always, one of the most charming and distinguished of companions.
Lucy approached her impetuously.
Oh! how white and stricken an aspect—through what a dark eclipse of pain the eyes looked out!