"Shall I not lift her up?" I asked, and Mrs. Grant raised her face again to me, white with suppressed anger.
"No," she answered, curtly. "Will you kindly leave this room. Your presence here is not needed."
I looked towards the fallen figure on the rug. The light head and the stone-white face seemed to multiply into a thousand replicas, and eddy round me. I walked out of the room.
"It will never be," I thought over and over to myself as I went down the stairs.
I turned into the dining-room, and flung myself into an armchair and waited there. Everything but Lucia herself was forgotten. My consciousness seemed suspended almost as completely as hers. At last the door opened, and Mrs. Grant herself came in. She started on seeing me.
"You still here, Victor," she said coldly.
"How could I go?" I murmured. "Is she better?"
"Yes; she is better."
Mrs. Grant's face was white and composed, her tones like ice. I saw she was unwilling to trust herself to speak to me even.
"May I not speak to her for one minute?"