have been strange if her image had not been prominent in his
meditations; but to-night for the first time he tried to get rid of this
image. He was used to her whims and changing moods, to her waywardness
and occasional tyranny. When he was a boy they had often quarrelled, and
taxed the efforts of his sister Alice, Lucia's inseparable friend, to
reconcile them; but since his long absence at college, and, above all,
since Alice's death, they had ceased to torment each other. The
relations of master and pupil had been added to those of playfellows,
and their intercourse had run on so smoothly that until to-night Maurice
had never known his charge's full power to irritate him. Like most
persons of steady and equable temperament, he felt deeply annoyed, even
humiliated, by having been surprised into impatience and anger; he was
doubly displeased with himself and with Lucia. Yet, as he thought of her
his mood softened; she was only a child, and would be good to-morrow.
But then she could not always be a child--a girl of sixteen ought to be
beginning to be reasonable; and then she did not look such a child. He
had been struck by that idea at one particular moment of this very
evening. It was when he had returned to the ball-room at the close of
the first quadrille, and had met Lucia walking up the room with Mr.
Percy. They had been talking together with animation; Lucia was a little
flushed, and looking more lovely than usual. Mr. Percy, for his part,
appeared to have forgotten his cool, almost supercilious manner, and to
be occupied more with her than with himself.

Maurice felt his cheek grow red as he recalled the picture. He moved
impatiently, and in doing so, displaced some loose papers, which slipped
to the ground. In stooping to gather them up, his hand touched a dead
flower, which had fallen with them. It was Lucia's rose. He was just
about to throw it down again, when his hand stopped. "She spoke of
something different," he muttered; "are the old times coming to an end,