A week later Alec MacKenzie and George Allerton started from Cross. They were to go by P. & O. from Marseilles to Aden, and there catch a German boat which would take them to Mombassa. Lady Kelsey was far too to see her nephew off; and Lucy was glad, since it gave her the chance of driving to the station alone with George. She found Dick Lomas and Mrs. Crowley already there. When the train steamed away, Lucy was a little apart from the others. She was quite still. She did not even wave her hand, and there was little expression on her face. Mrs. Crowley was crying cheerfully, and she dried her eyes with a tiny handkerchief. Lucy turned to her and thanked her for coming.  
'Shall I drive you back in the carriage?' Mrs. Crowley.
 
'I think I'll take a cab, if you don't mind,' Lucy answered quietly. 'Perhaps you'll take Dick.'
 
She did not bid them good-bye, but walked slowly away.
 
'How you people are!' cried Mrs. Crowley. 'I wanted to throw myself in her arms and have a good cry on the platform. You have no heart.'
 
Dick walked along by her side, and they got into Mrs. Crowley's carriage. She soliloquised.
 
'I thank God that I have emotions, and I don't mind if I do show them. I was the only person who cried. I knew I should cry, and I brought three handkerchiefs on purpose. Look at them.' She pulled them out of her bag and thrust them into Dick's hand. 'They're soaking.'
 
'You say it with triumph,' he smiled.
 
'I think you're all heartless. Those two boys were going away for heaven knows how long on a dangerous journey, and they may never come back, and you and Lucy said good-bye to them just as if they were going off for a day's golf. I was the only one who said I was sorry, and that we should miss them dreadfully. I hate this English coldness. When I go to America, it's ten to one nobody comes to see me off, and if anyone does he just nods and says "Good-bye, I hope you'll have a jolly time."'
 
'Next time you go I will come and myself on the ground, and gnash my teeth and at the top of my voice.'
 
'Oh, yes, do. And then I'll cry all the way to Liverpool, and I shall have a racking headache and feel quite and happy.'
 
Dick for a moment.
 
'You see, we have an horror of exhibiting our emotion. I don't know why it is, I suppose training or the inheritance of our sturdy fathers, but we're ashamed to let people see what we feel. But I don't know whether on that account our feelings are any the less keen. Don't you think there's a certain beauty in a grief that forbids itself all expression? You know, I admire Lucy tremendously, and as she came towards us on the platform I thought there was something very fine in her calmness.'
 
'Fiddlesticks!' said Mrs. Crowley, sharply. 'I should have liked her much better if she had clung to her brother and sobbed and had to be torn away.'
 
'Did you notice that she left us without even shaking hands? It was a very small , but it meant that she was quite absorbed in her grief.'
 
They reached Mrs. Crowley's tiny house in Norfolk Street, and she asked Dick to come in.
 
'Sit down and read the paper,' she said, 'while I go and powder my nose.'
 
Dick made himself comfortable. He blessed the charming woman when a butler of dimensions brought in all that was necessary to make a . Mrs. Crowley cultivated England like a museum . She had furnished her drawing-room with Chippendale furniture of an pattern. No chintzes were so smartly calendered as hers, and on the walls were mezzotints of the ladies whom Sir Joshua had painted. The chimney-piece was with Lowestoft china, and on the silver table was a collection of old English spoons. She had chosen her butler because he went so well with the house. His respectability was , his gravity was never disturbed by the shadow of a smile; and Mrs. Crowley treated him as though he were a piece of decoration, with an impertinence that fascinated him. He looked upon her as an outlandish freak, but his heavy British heart was surrendered to her , and he watched over her with a that amused and touched her.
 
Dick thought that the little drawing-room was very comfortable, and when Mrs. Crowley returned, after an unconscionable time at the toilet-table, he was in the happiest mood. She gave a rapid glance at the glasses.
 
'You're a perfect hero,' she said. 'You've waited till I came down to have your cocktail.'
 
'Richard Lomas, madam, is the soul of courtesy,' he replied, with a flourish. 'Besides, base is the soul that drinks in the morning by himself. At night, in your and without a collar, with a pipe in your mouth and a good book in your hand, a glass of whisky and is desirable; but the anteprandial cocktail needs the sparkle of conversation.'
 
'You seem to be in excellent health,' said Mrs. Crowley.
 
'I am. Why?'
 
'I saw in yesterday's paper that your doctor had ordered you to go abroad for the rest of the winter.'
 
'My doctor received the two guineas, and I wrote the prescription,' returned Dick. 'Do you remember that I explained to you the other day at length my intention of retiring into private life?'
 
'I do. I strongly of it.'
 
'Well, I was convinced that if I my duties without any excuse people would say I was mad and shut me up in a lunatic . I invented a in my health, and everything is plain sailing. I've got a pair for the rest of the session, and at the general election the excellent Robert Boulger will step into my unworthy shoes.'
 
'And supposing you regret the step you've taken?'
 
'In my youth I imagined, with the romantic fervour of my age, that in life everything was irreparable. That is a . One of the greatest advantages of life is that hardly anything is. One can make ever so many fresh starts. The average man lives long enough for a good many experiments, and it's they that give life its savour.'
 
'I don't approve of this flippant way you talk of life,' said Mrs. Crowley . 'It seems to me something serious and complicated.'
 
'That is an illusion of moralists. As a matter of fact, it's merely what you make it. Mine is quite light and simple.'
 
Mrs. Crowley looked at Dick reflectively.
 
'I wonder why you never married,' she said.
 
'I can tell you easily. Because I have a considerable gift for . I discovered in my early youth that men propose not because they want to marry, but because on certain occasions they are entirely at a loss for topics of conversation.'
 
'It was a discovery,' she smiled.
 
'No sooner had I made it than I began to cultivate my powers of small talk. I felt that my only chance was to be ready with appropriate subjects at the smallest notice, and I spent a considerable part of my last year at in studying the best masters.'
 
'I never noticed that you were particularly brilliant,' murmured Mrs. Crowley, raising her .
 
'I never played for brilliancy, I played for safety. I flatter myself that when was needed, I have never been found wanting. I have met the of sweet seventeen with a few observations on Free Trade, while the haggard efforts of thirty have struggled in vain against a brief exposition of the higher philosophy.'
 
'When people talk higher philosophy to me I make it a definite rule to blush,' said Mrs. Crowley.
 
'The widow of uncertain age has in before a complete acquaintance with the Restoration dramatists, and I have frequently routed the serious spinster with religious leanings by my knowledge of the results of endeavour in Central Africa. Once a dowager sought to ask me my intentions, but I flung at her astonished head an article from the Brittanica. An American divorcée swooned when I poured into her shell-like ear a few facts about the McKinley . These are only my serious efforts. I need not tell you how often I have a flash of the eyes by an epigram, or ignored a sigh by an apt from the poets.'
 
'I don't believe a word you say,' retorted Mrs. Crowley. 'I believe you never married for the simple reason that nobody would have you.'
 
'Do me the justice to acknowledge that I'm the only man who's known you for ten days without being by those coal-mines of yours in Pennsylvania to offer you his hand and heart.'
 
'I don't believe the coal has anything to do with it,' answered Mrs. Crowley. 'I put it down entirely to my very considerable personal attractions.'
 
Dick looked at the time and found that the cocktail had given him an appetite. He asked Mrs. Crowley if she would lunch with him, and they set out for a fashionable restaurant. Neither of them gave a thought to Alec and George speeding towards the unknown, nor to Lucy shut up in her room, given over to utter .
 
For Lucy it was the first of many days. Dick went to Naples, and enjoying his new-won idleness, did not even write to her. Mrs. Crowley, after deciding on a trip to Egypt, was called to America by the illness of a sister; and Lady Kelsey, unable to stand the rigour of a Northern winter, set out for Nice. Lucy refused to accompany her. Though she knew it would be impossible to see her father, she could not bear to leave England; she could not face the gay people who the Riviera, while he was bound to degrading tasks. The luxury of her own life her when she compared it with his hard fare; and she could not look upon the comfortable rooms she lived in, with their delicate , without thinking of the bare cell to which he was confined. Lucy was glad to be alone.
 
She went nowhere, but passed her days in , striving to acquire peace of mind; she took long walks in the parks with her dogs, and spent much time in the picture galleries. Without realising the effect they had upon her, she felt the calming influence of beautiful things; often she would sit in the National Gallery before some royal picture, and the joy of it would fill her soul with quiet relief. Sometimes she would go to those statues that decorated the pediment of the Parthenon, and the tears welled up in her clear eyes as she thanked the gods for the graciousness of their peace. She did not often listen to music, for then she could remain no longer mistress of her emotions; the tumultuous sounds of a symphony, the final of Tristan, made vain all her efforts at self-control; and when she got home, she could only throw herself on her bed and weep .
 
In reading she found her greatest . Many things that Alec had said returned dimly to her memory; and she began to read the Greek writers who had so profoundly him. She found a translation of Euripides which gave her some impression of the original, and her constant mood was answered by those old, exquisite tragedies. The of that great poet, his doubt, despair, and his love of beauty, to her heart as no modern writer could; and in the study of those sad deeds, in which men seemed always playthings of the fates, she found a relief to her own keen sorrow. She did not reason it out with herself, but almost unconsciously the thought came to her that the and arrows of the gods could be transformed into beauty by resignation and courage. Nothing was irreparable but a man's own weakness, and even in shame, disaster, and poverty, it was possible to lead a life that was not without . The man who was beaten to the ground by an fortune might be a finer thing than the unseeing, cruel powers that conquered him.
 
It was in this wise that Lucy battled with the intolerable shame that oppressed her. In that quiet corner of Hampshire in which her early years had been spent, among the memories of her dead kindred, the pride of her race had grown to proportions; and now in the reaction she was terrified lest its was in her, too, and in George. She could do nothing but suffer whatever pain it pleased the gods to send; but George was a man. In him were placed all her hopes. But now and again wild panic seized her. Then the agony was too great to bear, and she pressed her hands to her eyes in order to drive away the hateful thought: what if George failed her? She knew well enough that he had his father's engaging ways and his father's handsome face; but his father had had a smile as frank and a charm as great. What if with the son, too, they only insincerity and weakness? A devil whispered in her ear that now and again she had her eyes in order not to see George do things she hated. But it was youth that drove him. She had taken care to keep from him knowledge of the struggles that occupied her, and how could she wonder if he was reckless and uncaring? She would not doubt him, she could not doubt him, for if anything went wrong with him there was no hope left. She could only cease to believe in herself.
 
When Lucy was allowed to write to her father, she set herself to cheer him. The thought that over five years must elapse before she would have him by her side once more, paralysed her pen; but she would not allow herself to be discouraged. And she sought to give courage to him. She wanted him to see that her love was undiminished, and that he could count on it. Presently she received a letter from him. After a few weeks, the unaccustomed food, the change of life, had told upon him; and a general breakdown in his health had driven him into the infirmary. Lucy was thankful for the which his illness afforded. It must be a little less dreary in a prison hospital than in a prison cell.
 
A letter came from George, and another from Alec. Alec's was brief, telling of their journey down the Red Sea and their arrival at Mombassa; it was and awkward, making no reference to his love, or to the engagement which she had almost promised to make when he returned. He began and ended quite formally. George, in the best of spirits, wrote as he always did, in a boyish, inconsequent fashion. His letter was filled with slang and gave no news. There was little to show that it was written from Mombassa, on the of ............