’I wish I could go abroad, anywhere, everywhere with you, Lucy, and leave this place and its associations for ever!’

She played with the end of her bonnet-string, and hastily turned aside.  ‘Don’t ever touch upon that kind of topic again,’ she said, with a quick severity not free from anger.  ’It simply makes it impossible for me to see you, much less receive any guidance from you.  No, thank you, Mr. Barnet; you can do nothing for me at present; and as I suppose my uncertainty will end in my leaving for India, I fear you never will.  If ever I think you can do anything, I will take the trouble to ask you.  Till then, good-bye.’

The tone of her latter words was equivocal, and while he remained in doubt whether a gentle irony was or was not inwrought with their sound, she swept lightly round and left him alone.  He saw her form get smaller and smaller along the damp belt of sea-sand between ebb and flood; and when she had vanished round the cliff into the harbour-road, he himself followed in the same direction.

That her hopes from an advertisement should be the single thread which held Lucy Savile in England was too much for Barnet.  On reaching the town he went straight to the residence of Downe, now a widower with four children.  The young motherless brood had been sent to bed about a quarter of an hour earlier, and when Barnet entered he found Downe sitting alone.  It was the same room as that from which the family had been looking out for Downe at the beginning of the year, when Downe had slipped into the gutter and his wife had been so enviably tender towards him.  The old neatness had gone from the house; articles lay in places which could show no reason for their presence, as if momentarily deposited there some months ago, and forgotten ever since; there were no flowers; things were jumbled together on the furniture which should have been in cupboards; and the place in general had that stagnant, unrenovated air which usually pervades the maimed home of the widower.

Downe soon renewed his customary full-worded lament over his wife, and even when he had worked himself up to tears, went on volubly, as if a listener were a luxury to be enjoyed whenever he could be caught.

’She was a treasure beyond compare, Mr. Barnet!  I shall never see such another.  Nobody now to nurse me—­nobody to console me in those daily troubles, you know, Barnet, which make consolation so necessary to a nature like mine.  It would be unbecoming to repine, for her spirit’s home was elsewhere—­the tender light in her eyes always showed it; but it is a long dreary time that I have before me, and nobody else can ever fill the void left in my heart by her loss—­nobody—­nobody!’ And Downe wiped his eyes again.

‘She was a good woman in the highest sense,’ gravely answered Barnet, who, though Downe’s words drew genuine compassion from his heart, could not help feeling that a tender reticence would have been a finer tribute to Mrs. Downe’s really sterling virtues than such a second-class lament as this.