Chapter 26 - Page 2

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.

"Has he gone?" she asked.

"He has gone."

The moisture stood thick on her forehead. I passed my handkerchief over her face, and turned her towards the wind.

"Are you better now?"

"Yes."

"Can you walk home?"

"Easily."

I put her arm in mine. After advancing with me a few steps, she suddenly stopped--with a blind apprehension, as it seemed, of something in front of her. She lifted her little walking-cane, and moved it slowly backwards and forwards in the empty air, with the action of some one who is clearing away an encumbrance to a free advance--say the action of a person walking in a thick wood, and pushing aside the lower twigs and branches that intercept the way.

"What are you about?" I asked.

"Clearing the air," she answered.