Lady Lucy looked piteously at the speaker.

“And how long?” she said, trembling.

Mr. Nixon hesitated.  “I am afraid I can hardly answer that.  The blow was a most unfortunate one.  It might have done a worse injury.  Your son might be now a paralyzed invalid for life.  But the case is very serious, nor is it possible yet to say what all the consequences of the injury may be.  But keep your own courage up—­and his.  The better his general state, the more chance he has.”

A few minutes more, and the brougham had carried him away.  Lady Lucy, looking after it from the window of her sitting-room, knew that for her at last what she had been accustomed to describe every Sunday as “the sorrows of this transitory life” had begun.  Till now they had been as veiled shapes in a misty distance.  She had accepted them with religious submission, as applying to others.  Her mind, resentful and astonished, must now admit them—­pale messengers of powers unseen and pitiless!—­to its own daily experience; must look unprotected, unscreened, into their stern faces.

“John!—­John!” cried the inner voice of agonized regret.  And then:  “My boy!—­my boy!”

* * * * *

“What did he say?” asked Alicia’s voice, beside her.

The sound—­the arm thrown round her—­were not very welcome to Lady Lucy.  Her nature, imperious and jealously independent, under all her sweetness of manner, set itself against pity, especially from her juniors.  She composed herself at once.

“He does not give a good account,” she said, withdrawing herself gently but decidedly.  “It may take a long time before Oliver is quite himself again.”

Alicia persisted in a few questions, extracting all the information she could.  Then Lady Lucy sat down at her writing-table and began to arrange some letters.  Alicia’s presence annoyed her.  The truth was that she was not as fond of Alicia as she had once been.  These misfortunes, huddling one on another, instead of drawing them together, had in various and subtle ways produced a secret estrangement.  To neither the older nor the younger woman could the familiar metaphor have been applied which compares the effects of sorrow or sympathy on fine character to the bruising of fragrant herbs.  Ferrier’s death, sorely and bitterly lamented though it was, had not made Lady Lucy more lovable.  Oliver’s misfortune had not—­toward Lady Lucy, at any rate—­liberated in Alicia those hidden tendernesses that may sometimes transmute and glorify natures apparently careless or stubborn, brought eye to eye with pain.  Lady Lucy also resented her too long exclusion from Alicia’s confidence.  Like all the rest of the world, she believed there was an understanding between Oliver and Alicia.  Of course, there were reasons for not making anything of the sort public at present.  But a mother, she thought, ought to have been told.