Really she was the guardian of the whole party, and she was conscious of a tender and anxious responsibility.
Already they had been delayed a whole week in Orvieto by Eleanor's prostrate state.

She had not been dangerously ill; but it had been clearly impossible to leave doctor and chemist behind and plunge into the wilds.

So they had hidden themselves in a little Italian inn in a back street, and the days had passed somehow.
* * * * * Surely this hot evening and their shabby carriage and the dusty unfamiliar road were all dream-stuff--an illusion from which she was to wake directly and find herself once more in her room at Marinata, looking out on Monte Cavo?
Yet as this passed across Lucy's mind, she felt again upon her face the cool morning wind, as she and Eleanor fled down the Marinata hill in the early sunlight, between six and seven o'clock,--through the streets of Albano, already full and busy,--along the edge of that strange green crater of Aricia, looking up to Pio Nono's great viaduct, and so to Cecchina, the railway station in the plain.
An escape!--nothing else; planned the night before when Lucy's strong commonsense had told her that the only chance for her own peace and Eleanor's was to go at once, to stop any further development of the situation, and avoid any fresh scene with Mr.Manisty.
She thought of the details--the message left for Aunt Pattie that they had gone into Rome to shop before the heat; then the telegram 'Urgente,' despatched to the villa after they were sure that Mr.Manisty must have safely left it for that important field day of his clerical and Ultramontane friends in Rome, in which he was pledged to take part; then the arrival of the startled and bewildered Aunt Pattie at the small hotel where they were in hiding--her conferences--first with Eleanor, then with Lucy.
Strange little lady, Aunt Pattie! How much had she guessed?
What had passed between her and Mrs.Burgoyne?
When at last she and Lucy stood together hand in hand, the girl's sensitive spirit had divined in her a certain stiffening, a certain diminution of that constant kindness which she had always shown her guest.

Did Aunt Pattie blame her?
Had she cherished her own views and secret hopes for her nephew and Mrs.Burgoyne?
Did she feel that Lucy had in some way unwarrantably and ambitiously interfered with them?
At any rate, Lucy had divined the unspoken inference 'You must have given him encouragement!' and behind it--perhaps ?--the secret ineradicable pride of family and position that held her no fitting match for Edward Manisty.
Lucy's inmost mind was still sore and shrinking from this half-hour's encounter with Aunt Pattie.
But she had not shown it.

And at the end of it Aunt Pattie had kissed her ruefully with tears--'It's _very_ good of you! You'll take care of Eleanor!' Lucy could hear her own answer--'Indeed, indeed, I will!'-- and Aunt Pattie's puzzled cry, 'If only someone would tell me what I'm to do with _him_!' And then she recalled her own pause of wonder as Aunt Pattie left her--beside the hotel window, looking into the narrow side street.