Thrown down or not, Lucia snatches at it.

“Ah, I understand; poor Valentia!  You always hated her.”

“I did not:  but she is so brusque, and excited, and—­”

“Be so kind as not to abuse my family.  You may say what you will of me; but—­”

“And what have your family done for me, pray?”

“Why, considering that we are now living rent-free in my brother’s house, and—­” She stops in her turn; for her pride and her prudence also will not let her tell him that Valentia has been clothing her and the children for the last three years.  He is just the man to forbid her on the spot to receive any more presents, and to sacrifice her comfort to his own pride.  But what she has said is quite enough to bring out a very angry answer, which she expecting, nips in the bud by—­

“For goodness’ sake, don’t speak so loud; I don’t want the servants to hear.”

“I am not speaking loud”—­(he has not yet opened his lips).  “That is your old trick to prevent my defending myself, while you are driving one mad.  How dare you taunt me with being a pensioner on your brother’s bounty?  I’ll go up to town again and take lodgings there.  I need not be beholden to any aristocrat of them all.  I have my own station in the real world,—­the world of intellect; I have my own friends; I have made myself a name without his help; and I can live without his help, he shall find!”

“Which name were you speaking of?” rejoins she looking up at him, with all her native Irish humour flashing up for a moment in her naughty eyes.  The next minute she would have given her hand not to have said it; for, with a very terrible word, Elsley springs to his feet and dashes out of the room.

She hears him catch up his hat and cloak, and hurry out into the rain, slamming the door behind him.  She springs up to call him back, but he is gone;—­and she dashes herself on the floor, and bursts into an agony of weeping over “young bliss never to return”?  Not in the least.  Her principal fear is, lest he should catch cold in the rain.  She takes up her work again, and stitches away in the comfortable certainty that in half an hour she will have recovered her temper, and he also; that they will pass a sulky night; and to-morrow, by about mid-day, without explanation or formal reconciliation, have become as good friends as ever.  “Perhaps,” says she to herself, with a woman’s sense of power, “if he be very much ashamed and very wet, I’ll pity him and make friends to-night.”

Miserable enough are these little squabbles.  Why will two people, who have sworn to love and cherish each other utterly, and who, on the whole, do what they have sworn, behave to each other as they dare for very shame behave to no one else?  Is it that, as every beautiful thing has its hideous antitype, this mutual shamelessness is the devil’s ape of mutual confidence?  Perhaps it cannot be otherwise with beings compact of good and evil.  When the veil of reserve is withdrawn from between two souls, it must be withdrawn for evil, as for good, till the two natures, which ought to seek rest, each in the other’s inmost depths, may at last spring apart, confronting each other recklessly with,—­“There, you see me as I am; you know the worst of me, and I of you; take me as you find me—­what care I?”