Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/306

274 unfinished work, and sitting in the horsehair easy chair, leant back, a volume of Browning in her hand.

When at last Lucy looked up, Katharine spoke at once.

"It's a glorious love poem," she said; her eyes shone, and the schoolmistress had disappeared. "Shall I read it to you?"

To listen to a glorious love poem read by Katharine, at any time required the same kind of composure as the dentist's chair, but to-night had she proposed to let loose the specimens of animal life she kept in bottles and boxes, all over the room, Lucy would have given the same involuntary shudder.

"My head aches so, I must go to bed; good night," she said firmly, and leaving her half-finished books on the table, she left the room, with what for her were rapid movements.

"Good night," said Katharine, and buried herself again in her book.

"I know you'll be very angry," said Katharine the next afternoon, as Lucy stood in her hat and cloak ready to go out, "but I never can understand your friendship with that little Mrs. Dawson. She doesn't seem to me to have a thing in her."

Lucy smiled.

"And you frighten the very little she has out of her; but I—well, I like to go and hear about things outside the school."

"But it's all gossip, isn't it? "

"Yes, it's all gossip."

"How funny of you, Lucy. What kind of man is her husband?"

"We never get more than a few words together," said Lucy. Then she added. "He looks unhappy."

It was gossip, and yet Lucy listened. Ella (Mrs. Dawson's name was Ella) always apologised. "I know these things don't interest

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