“Very well, then, you may go,” said Miss Vane, with all her hauteur.
“Well, good evening,” said Lemuel passively, but the eyes that he looked at her with were moist, and conveyed a pathetic reproach. To her unmeasured astonishment, he offered her his hand; her amaze was even greater—more infinite, as she afterwards told Sewell—when she found herself shaking it.
He went out of the room, and she heard him walking about his room in the L, putting together his few belongings. Then she heard him go down and open the furnace door, and she knew he was giving a final conscientious look at the fire. He closed it, and she heard him close the basement door behind him, and knew that he was gone.
She explored the L, and then she descended to the basement and mechanically looked it over. Everything that could be counted hers by the most fastidious sense of property had been left behind him in the utmost neatness. On their accustomed nail, just inside the furnace-room, hung the blue overalls. They looked like a suicidal Lemuel hanging there.
Miss Vane went upstairs slowly, with a heavy heart. Under the hall light stood Sibyl, picturesque in the deep shadow it flung upon her face.
“Aunt Hope,” she began in a tragic voice.
“Don't speak to me, you wicked girl!” cried her aunt, venting her self-reproach upon this victim. “It is your doing.”
Sibyl turned with the meekness of an ostentatious scape-goat, unjustly bearing the sins of her tribe, and went upstairs into the wilderness of her own thoughts again.