"Poor Maurice, how good he is! What on earth made me so cross ?" She continued to watch.

Presently the light which had returned to the sitting-room vanished altogether, and a fainter gleam stole out from what she knew to be the window of Maurice's room.

She said "Good-night" softly, as if he could hear her, dropped her curtain, and was soon fast asleep.
That night Mrs.Costello's lamp was extinguished long before Maurice's.
Tired and dispirited, he had seated himself before his little writing-table, and given himself up to a dream of no pleasant kind.

It was so completely the habit of his life to think of Lucia that it would have been strange if her image had not been prominent in his meditations; but to-night for the first time he tried to get rid of this image.

He was used to her whims and changing moods, to her waywardness and occasional tyranny.