And, as she bent over them there suddenly arose in her mind a doubt--a question which seemed to have very little to do with those letters, yet which they certainly helped to raise--had she ever loved Percy?
Lucia was romantic.

Like other romantic girls, she would formerly have said--indeed, she had said to herself many times--"I shall love him all my life--even if he forgets me I shall still love him." And yet now she was conscious--dimly, unwillingly conscious, that she thought very little of him, and that even that little was not at all in the strain she would have felt to be proper in a deserted heroine of fiction.

She was not the least likely to die of a broken heart for him; she was much more inclined to die for grief and shame at what had befallen Maurice.
So that question, which was in itself a mortifying one, rose rebelliously in her mind--had she ever loved Percy?
or had she been wasting her thoughts on a mere lay-figure, dressed up by her own fancy in attributes not at all belonging to it?
Poor child! had she known how many women--and perhaps men also--do the very same, the idea might not have seemed quite so horrible to her.
Horrible or not, she put it aside and went back to the letters.

In the earlier ones there were many allusions which seemed almost to belong to a former existence, so utterly had her life changed since they were written.

The bright days of last summer, before the first cloud came over her fortunes, seemed to return almost too vividly to her memory; she would have bargained away a year of her life to be able to regain the simple happiness of that time.