Lionel could not avoid laughing.

“What can have put such a thing in your head, mother, I am at a loss to conceive.  Certainly nothing in my conduct has induced it.  I have talked to Lucy as a child, more than as anything else; I have scarcely thought of her but as one——­”

“Lucy is not a child,” interrupted Lady Verner.

“In years I find she is not.  When I first saw her at the railway-station, I thought she was a child, and the impression somehow remains upon my mind.  Too often I talk to her as one.  As to anything else—­were I to marry to-morrow, it is not Lucy Tempest I should make my wife.”

The first glad look that Lionel had seen on Lady Verner’s face for many a day came over it then.  In her own mind she had been weaving a pretty little romance for Lionel; and it was her dread, lest that romance should be interfered with, which had called up her fears, touching Lucy Tempest.

“My darling Lionel, you know where you might go and choose a wife,” she said.  “I have long wished that you would do it.  Beauty, rank, wealth—­you may win them for the asking.”

A slightly self-conscious smile crossed the lips of Lionel.

“You are surely not going to introduce again that nonsense about Mary Elmsley!” he exclaimed.  “I should never like her, never marry her, therefore—­”

“Did you not allude to her when you spoke but now—­that it was not Lucy Tempest you should make your wife?”

“No.”

“To whom, then?  Lionel, I must know it.”

Lionel’s cheek flushed scarlet.  “I am not going to marry yet—­I have no intention of it.  Why should this conversation have arisen?”

The words seemed to arouse a sudden dread on the part of Lady Verner.  “Lionel,” she gasped in a low tone, “there is a dreadful fear coming over me.  Not Lady Mary!  Some one else!  I remember Decima said one day that you appeared to care more for Sibylla West than for her, your sister.  I have never thought of it from that hour to this.  I paid no more attention to it than though she had said you cared for my maid Therese.  You cannot care for Sibylla West!”

Lionel had high notions of duty as well as of honour, and he would not equivocate to his mother.  “I do care very much for Sibylla West,” he said in a low tone; “and, please God, I hope she will sometime be my wife.  But, mother, this confidence is entirely between ourselves.  I beg you not to speak of it; it must not be suffered to get abroad.”

The one short sentence of avowal over, Lionel might as well have talked to the moon.  Lady Verner heard him not.  She was horrified.  The Wests in her eyes were utterly despicable.  Dr. West was tolerated as her doctor; but as nothing else.  Her brave Lionel—­standing there before her in all the pride of his strength and his beauty—­he sacrifice himself to Sibylla West!  Of the two, Therese might have been the less dreadful to the mind of Lady Verner.