"But how did you happen to come just at the right moment?"

"I saw you from my window. I noticed that you were very busy for awhile,
and when you stopped working and sat down in that disconsolate attitude,
I guessed some terrible misfortune must have happened. So I came."

Lucia looked at him gravely, a little troubled.

"I never saw anybody like you," she said; "you seem always to know when
one is in a dilemma."

Maurice laughed.

"If all dilemmas were like this, I might easily get up a character for
being a sort of Providence; but come and show me what else there is to
do."

They worked together for an hour, by the end of which, all was restored
nearly to its former neatness. Mrs. Costello came out and found them
busy at the vine. Maurice was on a ladder nailing it up, while Lucia
handed him the nails and strips of cloth, as he wanted them. She felt a
lively pleasure in seeing them thus occupied. Maurice was too dear to
her, for her not to have seen how Lucia's recent and gradual
estrangement had troubled him; for his sake, therefore, as well as for
her own and her child's, she had grieved daily over what she dared not
interfere to prevent,--the breaking up of old habits, and the
intervention between these two of an influence she dreaded. The
experience of her own life had convinced her, rightly or wrongly, that
it was worse than useless for parents to try to control their children's
inclinations in the most important point where inclination ever ought to