Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/285

286 She cast one glance round the room and fled—to collapse in tears on the stairs.

Lucilla remained. "I think it's a great deal too bad," she said. "Why let us have it at all?"

"Ah, why?" said Rochester. "But all's not lost yet. I believe really you'll do better without the paying guests—they're such an awful risk, aren't they? I say—do, do be an angel and send Jane to the library for something. I must see her alone. Do, do, do!"

But when she found Jane in tears on the stairs it seemed better to Lucilla that Mr. Rochester himself should persuade her to the library if he wanted her there. Lucilla herself trailed miserably after Miss Antrobus. Sympathy from someone she must have—about Cedar Court. Nobody wanted Lucilla in libraries; the two who might have wanted her had both gone over the seas, and Heigh-ho, but it was a cold world!

But Miss Antrobus was full of plans as well as of sympathy. The three girls could all live in the cottage; it would be great fun, and not nearly so trying to the nerves as the responsibility of a big house. They sat on the edge of the sink in the bare kitchen of the large cottage and laid the foundation of sober Spanish cottages.

And Rochester had taken Jane's wet hands and pulled them from her face, and put his arm round her, and taken her into the library and shut the door. Jane instantly buried her face against a leather sofa-cushion.

"Don't cry, Jane," he said; "don't cry—don't. You haven't really lost anything that matters. You've got Lucilla, and you've got Gladys, and you've got Dix—the super-gardener—and Miss Antrobus, who really isn't half a bad sort; and you've got me, Jane, if you'll have me."

"Oh, don't!" said Jane, with her face in the sofa-cushion. "Oh, I wish you wouldn't!" "Don't you like me to hold your poor little cold hands? But let me hold them just a minute, Jane. You know when you tried that charm, on St. John's Eve, and lighted the