"You are not yourself to-day," I said to her. "Let us go home."
"No!" she answered. "I must accustom myself to speak to him. I will begin to-day. Take me to him—but don't let him touch me!"
Nugent disengaged himself from Oscar—whose unfitness to help us through our difficulties was too manifest to be mistaken—as he saw us approaching. He pointed to the low wall in front of the house, and motioned to his brother to wait there out of the way before Lucilla could speak to him again. The wisdom of this proceeding was not long in asserting itself. Lucilla asked for Oscar the moment after he had left us. Nugent answered that Oscar had gone back to the house to get his hat.
The sound of Nugent's voice helped her to calculate her distance from him without assistance from me. Still holding my arm, she stopped and spoke to him.
"Nugent," she said, "I have made Oscar tell me—what he ought to have told me long since." (She paused between each sentence; painfully controlling herself, painfully catching her breath.) "He has discovered a foolish antipathy of mine. I don't know how; I tried to keep it a secret from him. I need not tell you what it is."
She made a longer pause at those words, holding me closer and closer to her; struggling more and more painfully against the irresistible nervous loathing that had got possession of her.
He listened, on his side, with the constraint which always fell upon him in her presence more marked than ever. His eyes were on the ground. He seemed reluctant even to look at her.
"I think I understand," she went on, "why Oscar was unwilling to tell me——" she stopped, at a loss how to express herself without running the risk of hurting his feelings—"to tell me," she resumed, "what it is in you which is not like other people. He was afraid my stupid weakness might prejudice me against you. I wish to say that I won't let it do that. I never was more ashamed of it than now. I, too, have my misfortune. I ought to sympathize with you, instead of——"
Her voice had been growing fainter and fainter as she proceeded. She leaned against me heavily. One glance at her told me that if I let it go on any longer she would fall into a swoon. "Tell your brother that we have gone back to the rectory," I said to Nugent. He looked up at Lucilla for the first time.
"You are right," he answered. "Take her home." He repeated the sign by which he had already hinted to me to be silent—and joined Oscar at the wall in front of the house.