There was no mistaking the situation. At one of the red-legged tables sat Fred, his arms spread out before him, his face hidden in his arms; while Lucy, with a troubled face, stood near, struggling between her genuine compunction and an irrepressible desire to laugh.

It was Sunday morning; the rest of the household were at church, and the two young people had had the studio to themselves without fear of disturbance; a circumstance of which the unfortunate Fred had hastened to avail himself, thereby rushing on his fate.

They had now reached that stage of the proceedings when the rejected suitor, finding entreaty of no avail, has recourse to manifestations of despair and reproach.

"You shouldn't have encouraged a fellow all these years," came hoarsely from between the arms and face of the prostrate swain.

"'All these years!' how can you be so silly, Fred?" cried Lucy, with some asperity. "Why, I shall be accused next of encouraging little Jack Oakley, because I bowled his hoop round Regent's Park for him last week."

Lucy did not mean to be unkind; but the really unexpected avowal from her old playmate had made her nervous; a refusal to treat it seriously seemed to her the best course to pursue. But her last words, as might have been supposed, were too much for poor Fred. Up he sprang, "a wounded thing with a rancorous cry"—

"There is another fellow!"

Back started Lucy, as if she had been shot. The hot blood surged up into her face, the tears rose to her eyes.

"What has that to do with it?" she cried, stung suddenly to cruelty; "what has that to do with it, when, if you were the only man in the world, I would not marry you?"

Fred, hurt and shocked by this unexpected attack from gentle Lucy, gathered himself up with something more like dignity than he had displayed in the course of the interview.

"Oh, very well," he said, taking up his hat; "perhaps one of these days you will be sorry for what you have done. I'm not much, I know, but you won't find many people to care for you as I would have cared." His voice broke suddenly, and he made his way rather blindly to the door.

Lucy was trembling all over, and as pale as, a moment ago, she had been red. She wanted to say something, as she watched him fumbling unsteadily with the door-handle; but her lips refused to frame the words.

Without lifting his head he passed into the little passage. Lucy heard his retreating footsteps, then her eye fell on a roll of newspapers at her feet. She picked them up hastily.

"Fred," she cried, "you have forgotten these."

But he vouchsafed no answer, and in another moment she heard the outer door shut.

She stood a moment with the ridiculous bundle in her hand—Tit-Bits and a pink, crushed copy of The Sporting Times—then something between a laugh and a sob rose in her throat, the papers fell to the ground, and sinking on her knees by the table, she buried her face in her hands and burst into bitter weeping.

Gertrude, coming in from church some ten minutes later, found her sister thus prostrate.

The sight unnerved her from its very unusualness; bending over Lucy she whispered, "Am I to go away?"

"No, stop here."

Gertrude locked the door, then came and knelt by her sister.

"Oh, poor Fred, and I was so horrid to him," wept the penitent.

"Ah, I was afraid it would come."

Gertrude stroked the prone, smooth head; she feared that the thought of some one else besides Fred lay at the bottom of all this disturbance. She was very anxious for Lucy in these days; very anxious and very helpless. There was only one person, she knew too well, who could restore to Lucy her old sweet serenity, and he, alas, made no sign.

What was she to think? One thing was clear enough; the old pleasant relationship between themselves and Frank was at an end; if renewed at all, it must be renewed on a different basis. A disturbing element, an element of self-consciousness had crept into it; the delicate charm, the first bloom of simplicity, had departed for ever.

It was now the middle of July, and for the last week or two they had seen scarcely anything of Jermyn, beyond the glimpses of him as he lounged up the street, with his sombrero crushed over his eyes, all the impetuosity gone from his gait.

That he distinctly avoided them, there could be little doubt. Though he was to be seen looking across at the house wistfully enough, he made no attempt to see them, and his greetings when they chanced to meet were of the most formal nature.

The change in his conduct had been so marked and sudden, that it was impossible that it should escape observation. Fanny, with an air of superior knowledge, gave it out as her belief that Mr. Jermyn was in love; Phyllis held to the opinion that he had been fired with the idea of a big picture, and was undergoing the throes of artistic conception; Gertrude said lightly, that she supposed he was out of sorts and disinclined for society; while Lucy held her peace, and indulged in many inward sophistries to convince herself that her own unusual restlessness and languor had nothing to do with their neighbour's disaffection.

It was these carefully woven self-deceptions that had been so rudely scattered by Fred's words; and Lucy, kneeling by the scarlet table, had for the first time looked her fate in the face, and diagnosed her own complaint.

"Lucy," said Gertrude, after a pause, "bathe your eyes and come for a walk in the Park; there is time before lunch."

Lucy rose, drying her wet face with her handkerchief.

"Let me look at you," cried Gertrude. "What is the charm? Where does it lie? Why are these sort of things always happening to you?"

"Oh," answered Lucy, with an attempt at a smile, "I am a convenient, middling sort of person, that is all. Not uncomfortably clever like you, or uncomfortably pretty like Phyllis."

The two girls set off up the hot dusty street, with its Sunday odour of bad tobacco. Regent's Park wore its most unattractive garb; a dead monotony of July verdure assailed the eye; a verdure, moreover, impregnated and coated with the dust and soot of the city. The girls felt listless and dispirited, and conscious that their walk was turning out a failure.

As they passed through Clarence Gate, on their way back, Frank darted past them with something of his normal activity, lifting his hat with something like the old smile.

"He might have stopped," said Lucy, pale to the lips, and suddenly abandoning all pretence of concealment of her feelings.

"No doubt he is in a hurry;" answered Gertrude, lamely. "I daresay he is going to lunch in Sussex Place. Lord Watergate's Sunday luncheon parties are quite celebrated."

The day dragged on. The weather was sultry and every one felt depressed. Fanny was spending the day with relations of her future husband's; but the three girls had no engagements and lounged away the afternoon rather dismally at home.

All were relieved when Fanny and Mr. Marsh came in at supper-time, and they seated themselves at the table with alacrity. They had not proceeded far with the meal, when footsteps, unexpected but familiar, were heard ascending the staircase; then some one knocked, and before there was time to reply, the door was thrown open to admit Frank Jermyn.

He looked curiously unlike himself as he advanced and shook hands amid an uncomfortable silence that everybody desired to break. His face was pale, and no longer moody, but tense and eager, with shining eyes and dilated nostrils.

"You will stay to supper, Mr. Jermyn?" said Gertrude, at last, in her most neutral tones.

"Yes, please." Frank drew a chair to the table like a person in a dream.

"You are quite a stranger," cried arch, unconscious Fan, indicating with head and spoon the dish from which she proposed to serve him.

Frank nodded acceptance of the proffered fare, but ignored her remark.

Silence fell again upon the party, broken by murmurs from the enamoured Edward, and the ostentatious clatter of knives and forks on the part of people who were not eating. Every one, except the plighted lovers, felt that there was electricity in the air.

At last Frank dropped his fork, abandoning, once for all, the pretence of supper.

"Miss Lucy," he cried across the table to her, "I have a piece of news."

She looked up, pale, with steady eyes, questioning him.

"I am going abroad to-morrow."

"Oh, where are you going?" cried Fanny, vaguely mystified.

"I am going to Africa."

He did not move his eyes from Lucy as he spoke; her head had drooped over her plate. "They are sending me out as special from The Woodcut, in the place of poor Leadpoint, who has died of fever. I heard the first of it last night, and this morning it was finally settled. It makes," cried Frank, "an immense difference in my prospects."

Edward Marsh, who objected to Frank as a spoilt puppy, always expecting other people to be interested in his affairs, asked the young man bluntly the value of his appointment. But he met with no reply; for Frank, his face alight, had sprung to his feet, pushing back his chair.

"Lucy, Lucy," he cried in a low voice, "won't you come and speak to me?"

Lucy rose like one mesmerised; took, with a presence of mind at which she afterwards laughed, the key of the studio from its nail, and followed Frank from the room, amidst the stupefaction of the rest of the party.

It was a sufficiently simple explanation which took place, some minutes later, in the very room where, a few hours before, poor Fred had received his dismissal.

"But why," said Lucy, presently, "have you been so unkind for the last fortnight?"

"Ah, Lucy," answered Frank; "you women so often misjudge us, and think that it is you alone who suffer, when the pain is on both sides. When it dawned upon me how things stood with you and me—dear girl, you told me more than you knew yourself—I reflected what a poor devil I was, with not the ghost of a prospect. (I have been down on my luck lately, Lucy.) And I saw, at the same time, how it was with Devonshire; I thought, he is a good fellow, let him have his chance, it may be best in the end——"

"Oh, Frank, Frank, what did you think of me? If these are men's arguments I am glad that I am a woman," cried Lucy, clinging to the strong young hand.

"Well, so am I, for that matter," answered Frank; and then, of course, though I do not uphold her conduct in this respect, Lucy told him briefly of Fred Devonshire's offer and her own refusal.

It was late before these two happy people returned to the sitting-room, to receive congratulations on the event, which, by this time, it was unnecessary to impart.

Fanny wondered aloud why she had not thought of such a thing before; and felt, perhaps, that her own rechauffÉ love affair was quite thrown into the shade. Phyllis smiled and made airy jests, submitting her soft cheek gracefully to a brotherly kiss.

Edward Marsh looked on mystified and rather shocked, and Gertrude remained in the background, with a heart too full for speech, till the lovers made their way to her, demanding her congratulations.

"Don't think me too unworthy," said Frank, in all humility.

"I am glad," she said.

Glancing up and seeing the two young faces, aglow with the light of their happiness, she looked back with a wistful amusement on her own doubts and fears of the past weeks.

As she did so, the beautiful, familiar words flashed across her consciousness—

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

* * * * *

Late that night, when the guests had departed and the rest of the household was asleep, Gertrude heard Lucy moving about in the room below, and, throwing on her dressing-gown, went down stairs. She found her sister risen from the table, where she had been writing a letter by the lamp-light.

"Aren't you coming to bed, Lucy? Remember, you have to be up very early."

The shadow of the coming separation, which at first had only seemed to give a more exquisite quality to her happiness, lay on Lucy. She was pale, and her steadfast eyes looked out with the old calm, but with a new intensity, from her face.

"Read this," she said, "it seemed only fair."

Stooping over the table, Gertrude read—

"Dear Fred,—I am engaged to Frank Jermyn, who goes abroad to-morrow. I am sorry if I seemed unkind, but I was grieved and shocked by what you said to me. Very soon, when you have quite forgiven me, you will come and see us all, will you not? Acknowledge that you made a mistake, and never cease to regard me as your friend.—L. L."

Gertrude thought: "Then I shall not have to tell Conny, after all."