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He more than disliked, he distrusted her air of over-strained propriety. He detected in it the first note of falseness in her character. In a thousand little things her instincts, her perceptions were at fault. This was disagreeably borne in upon him that first Saturday after Lucia's arrival, when he and Flossie were in the train going down to Ealing.
She looked up for a moment, but with hard tearless eyes and set lips, and only to put away from her the hand that had been softly laid on her shoulder. Mrs. Costello drew back; she returned to her chair, and sat down to wait, but the long deep sigh which unconsciously escaped her, as she did so, reached Lucia's heart.
He came into Lucia's presence with a sense of doing something voluntary and yet inevitable, something sanctioned and foreappointed; a sense of carrying on a thing already begun, of returning, through a door that had never been shut, to the life wherein alone he knew himself. And yet this life, measured by days and hours and counting their times of meeting only, ran hardly to six weeks.
At the foot of the steps of the Capitol he stopped again. "You know, Sor Gasparo," he said, "the reason why I did not arrange about Lucia's marriage a long time ago, was because I was not particularly in a hurry to have her married at all. And I am not in a hurry now, either. We shall have plenty of opportunities of discussing the matter hereafter. Good-bye, Sor Gasparo.
Lucia slid down to the floor, half kneeling at her mother's feet. "About myself and him," she murmured. Mrs. Costello raised her daughter's face to the light, and looked at it closely with an almost bitter scrutiny. "Child," she said, "I thought you would have been safe from this. I did him injustice, it seems." A new instinct in Lucia's mind roused her against her mother.
To to Egypt," she concluded. For Anna had never heard much that was pleasant about Egypt, and was sure that all this trouble was Lucia's fault. Rebecca had never been so unhappy in her life as when she realized that her mother expected her to go to the Hortons' and ask Lucia's pardon for not inviting Mrs. Horton and Lucia to the honey party.
Bellairs and Bella. The former came to see Mrs. Costello, the latter had affairs of her own with Lucia. Mr. Percy, for once, was decidedly de trop, but after awhile the two girls slipped away and shut themselves up in Lucia's bedroom. The moment the door was closed, Bella burst into a torrent of talk.
But the habit of controlling his feelings in order not to offend the man of the church, and especially in order not to hurt Lucia's sensitive nature, had begun gradually to change and modify the young man's character.
Mrs Quantock's Guru would become Lucia's Guru and all Riseholme would flock hungrily for light and leading to The Hurst. She had written to Lucia in all sincerity, hoping that she would extend the hospitality of her garden-parties to the Guru, but now the very warmth of Lucia's reply caused her to suspect this ulterior motive.
Lucia Wessel, too, wuz holding her young charge by the hand, but her attention wuz all drawed off by another young chap that I'd seen with her a number of times, and I didn't like his looks; he had the same sort of a dissipated look that the other young man had, but I see by the expression of Lucia's innocent eyes that she didn't share in my opinion; she looked as if she wuz fairly wropped up in him.
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