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Rh "You had much better tell me," he said. "It is my business to make any—any weak points stronger."

"No, it was not the case," said Lucia.

"Ah; a pity. Of course, as you say, the Duchess is your friend. But nobody knows what cross-examination is, until he has been subjected to it. Now have you anything else to tell me?"

"I think I have told you all," said Lucia.

Mr. Baxter opened his mouth a little and stared at the fire. Once or twice he asked her a question, but continued staring, as if her answers did not mean much.

At length he spoke.

"I do not see the faintest chance of a successful defence," he said. "If you wish, I will do my best. I am very sorry, but my advice to you is that you do not defend the suit."

That was Friday. In the evening her maid came from Ashdown, with piles of luggage. It was bestowed in the little anteroom of the suite; the maid occupied the bedroom that should have been Edgar's.

After her sleepless night Lucia went early to bed, and slept soundly and dreamlessly. When she awoke, after a moment of the sense of being lost, of not knowing where she was, she woke to a sense of tremendous vitality. She recalled at once and vividly the interview of the day before, and, so far from going back into the past, projected herself into the future. It was infinitely better to have done with the false and double life, even though that implied the giving up of all that had formed the subject of her ambitions. But into these ambitions, love, the one thing worth having, had never come. The ambition, the success and achievement, had been hers; she had climbed to the very top of the highest tree, and seen all the other tree-tops waving below her. Then she had sprung upward again to the sun itself, and though that leap had caused her to lose her footing, in this moment of falling through the sunny air she did not regret it. The last two or three months had given her more happiness than all the yield of the fat years; they, those few months, had given all that the fat years lacked, of which the absence made them seem so lean. Besides, she could hardly yet believe that she had lost all; she was a woman of a million friends—surely her friends would be friends still. Whatever the Divorce Court might decree, she would be silent, as Mr. Baxter had counselled,