If she does, I beg she will not write to me. It
could only embitter matters."
"I will give her your message. Good-bye, Oliver." He left the room, with
a gesture of farewell to Ferrier.
* * * * *
Ferrier came back toward the fire. As he did so he was struck--painfully
struck--by a change in Lady Lucy. She was not pale, and her eyes were
singularly bright. Yet age was, for the first time, written in a face
from which Time had so far taken but his lightest toll. It moved him
strangely; though, as to the matter in hand, his sympathies were all
with Oliver. But through thirty years Lady Lucy had been the only woman
for him. Since first, as a youth of twenty, he had seen her in her
father's house, he had never wavered. She was his senior by five years,
and their first acquaintance had been one of boy-adoration on his side
and a charming elder-sisterliness on hers. Then he had declared himself,
and she had refused him in order to marry Henry Marsham and Henry
Marsham's fortune. It seemed to him then that he would soon forget
her--soon find a warmer and more generous heart. But that was mere
ignorance of himself.
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