Lucy, whose luck-pieces in the last few days had ranged from a Woolworth monkey-on-a-stick to a South African halfpenny, waited with some curiosity to see what The Nut Tart's idea of the thing might be.
It was a blue bead.
"It was dug up in Central America a hundred years ago and it is almost as old as the world. It is very lucky."
"But I can't take that from you," Lucy protested.
"Oh, I have a little bracelet of them. It was the bracelet that was dug up. But I have taken out one of the beads for you. There are five left and that is plenty. And I have a piece of news for you. I am not going back to Brazil."
"No?"
"I am going to stay in England and marry Rick."
Lucy said that she was delighted to hear it.
"We shall be married in London in October, and you will be there and you will come to the wedding, no?"
Yes, Lucy would come to the wedding with pleasure.
"I am so glad about it," she said. She needed some contact with happiness after the last few days.
"Yes, it is all very satisfactory. We are cousins but not too near, and it is sensible to keep it in the family. I always thought I should like to marry an Englishman; and of course Rick is a parti. He is senior partner although he is so young. My parents are very pleased. And my grandmother, of course."
"And I take it that you yourself are pleased?" Lucy said, a shade dashed by this matter-of-fact catalogue.
"Oh yes. Rick is the only person in the world except my grandmother who can make me do things I don't want to do. That will be very good for me."
She looked at Lucy's doubtful face, and her great eyes sparkled.
"And of course I like him very much," she said.
When the diplomas had been presented, Lucy had mid-morning coffee with the Staff and said goodbye to them. Since she was leaving in the middle of the morning no one was free to come to the station with her. Henrietta thanked her, with undoubted tears in her eyes this time, for the help she had been. (But not in her wildest imaginings would Henrietta guess how much the help amounted to.) Lucy was to consider Leys as her home any time she wanted to come and stay, or if she ever wanted a lecturer's job again, or if-or if-
And Lucy had to hide the fact that Leys, where she had been so happy, was the one place in the world that she would never come back to. A place that she was going, if her conscience and the shade of Rouse would let her, to blot out of her mind.
The Staff went to their various duties and Lucy went back to her room to finish packing. She had not spoken to Innes since that so-incredible conversation on Saturday morning; had hardly seen her, indeed, except for the moment when she had taken her diploma from Miss Hodge's hands.
Was Innes going to let her go without a word?
But when she came back to her room she found that word on her table. A written word. She opened the envelope and read
Dear Miss Pym,
Here it is in writing. For the rest of my life I shall atone for the thing I can't undo. I pay forfeit gladly. My life for hers.
I am sorry that this has spoiled Leys for you. And I hope that you will not be unhappy about what you have done for me. I promise to make it worth while.
Perhaps, ten years from today, you will come to the West Country and see what I have done with my life. That would give me a date to look forward to. A landmark in a world without them.
Meanwhile, and always, my gratitude-my unspeakable gratitude.
Mary Innes.
"What time did you order the taxi for?" Beau asked, coming in on top of her knock.
"Half-past eleven."
"It's practically that now. Have you everything in that is going in? Hot water bottle? You hadn't one. Umbrella down-stairs? You don't possess one. What do you do? Wait in doorways till it's over, or steal the nearest one? I had an aunt who always bought the cheapest she could find and discarded it in the nearest waste-paper-bin when the rain stopped. More money than sense, as my nanny used to say. Well, now. Is that all? Consider well, because once we get those cases shut we'll never get them open again. Nothing left in the drawers? People always leave things stuck at the back of drawers." She opened the small drawers of the table and ran her hands into the back of them. "Half the divorces in the Western Hemisphere start through the subsequent revelations."
She withdrew her right hand, and Lucy saw that she was holding the little silver rosette; left lying at the back of the drawer because Lucy had not been able to make up her mind what to do with it.
Beau turned it over in her fingers.
"That looks like the little button thing off my shoe," she said.
"Your shoe?"
"Yes. Those black pump things that one wore at dancing class. I hung on to them because they are so lovely when one's feet are tired. Like gloves. I can still wear the shoes I wore when I was fourteen. I always had enormous feet for my age, and believe me it was no consolation to be told that you were going to be tall." Her attention went back to the thing she was holding. "So this is where I lost it," she said. "You know, I wondered quite a lot about that." She dropped it into her pocket. "You'll have to sit on this case, I'm afraid. You sit on it and I'll wrestle with the locks."
Automatically Lucy sat on it.
She wondered why she had never noticed before how cold those blue eyes were. Brilliant and cold and shallow.
The bright hair fell over her lap as Beau wrestled with the locks. The locks would do what she wanted, of course. Everything and everyone, always, since the day she was born, had done what she wanted. If they hadn't, she took steps to see that they did. At the age of four, Lucy remembered, she had defeated a whole adult world because her will to have things her way was greater than all the wills combined against her.
She had never known frustration.
She could not visualise the possibility of frustration.
If her friend had the obvious right to Arlinghurst, then to Arlinghurst she should go.
"There! That's done it. Stand by to sit on the other if I can't manage it. I see Giddy's given you one of his loathsome little plants. What a bore for you. Perhaps you can exchange it for a bowl at the back door one day."
How soon, Lucy wondered, had Innes begun to suspect? Almost at once? Certainly before the afternoon, when she had turned green on the spot where it had happened.
But she had not been sure until she saw the silver rosette on Lucy's palm, and learned where it had been found.
Poor Innes. Poor Innes, who was paying forfeit.
"Tax-i!" yelled a voice along the corridor.
"There's your cab. I'll take your things. No, they're quite light; you forget the training I've had. I wish you weren't going, Miss Pym. We shall miss you so much."
Lucy heard herself saying the obvious things. She even heard herself promising Beau that she might come to them for Christmas, when Beau would be home for her first «working» holidays.
Beau put her into the cab, took a tender farewell of her, and said: "The station" to the driver, and the taxi slid into motion and Beau's face smiled a moment beyond the window, and was gone.
The driver pushed back the glass panel and asked: "London train, lady?" Yes, Lucy said, to London.
And in London she would stay. In London was her own, safe, nice, calm, collected existence, and in future she would be content with it. She would even give up lecturing on psychology.
What did she know about psychology anyhow?
As a psychologist she was a first-rate teacher of French.
She could write a book about character as betrayed by facial characteristics. At least she had been right about that. Mostly.
Eyebrows that sent people to the stake.
Yes, she would write a book about face-reading.
Under another name, of course. Face-reading was not well seen among the intelligentsia.