Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/134

124 told you. So I arranged things, as you see. I meant to tell you about it all. I am telling you now."

Lucia had quite recovered her normal vivacity. She sat up, brilliant, bright-eyed, full of the intensest exultation.

"So I wrote to him, asking him to come here yesterday, and then sent you all off for a picnic. I had to have an excuse for not going, hadn't I? So I invented a headache."

Maud's serenity, however, which had vanished but for a moment when Lucia told her the first part of her revelations, seemed quite to have deserted her now. She looked at her friend with puzzled wonder.

"But, Lucia, dear Lucia, what would he think," she asked, "when he found you had invited him over here, and received him alone, without anybody?"

Lucia laughed; she was still too much taken up with the ingenuity of her scheme to notice the change in Maud's face.

"Oh, I thought of that, too," she said. "I allow that I had to sit down and think, so to speak, but when I really sit down to think I generally get it right. He found me seated on the beach, and I was embarrassed. I didn't tell a lie, but I said, 'Didn't I ask you for Friday, not Thursday?' And then I broke to him that I was quite alone and that everybody but me had gone for a picnic. He produced my note to show he hadn't made a mistake, and there, of course, it was: 'Do come on Thursday.' Oh, Maud, the Bismarck of Littlestone! That's me."

Even now the supreme egotism of Lucia's nature blinded her to the effect that this story of successful diplomacy was having on Maud.

She proceeded:

"And then we walked down on this beach, this dear, empty beach, which I told him I was so fond of; and he said it was full—full of me! And so there we were. Oh, I am so happy. I don't think anyone has ever been as happy as I. And as for you, Maud, you're a perfect darling! I don't know which of you I love most—I don't indeed."

Maud sat quite silent, while Lucia babbled on. Before, when Lucia discharged the first bomb of her revelations, her best self was in entire sympathy with her friend: it had only been against what she would have called her selfish self that she had to struggle. But now, in order to be in sympathy with Lucia, she had to struggle against her best self, which was in revolt. This diplomacy, the ingenuity of it, the—the meanness of it, and perhaps,