Invitations from the Brettons and the de Bassompierres give Lucy a social life Madame Beck can praise. Praise does not protect the desk. Madame borrows the five letters from Dr John, reads them in her own chamber, and puts them back. Lucy bears that. She bears it less easily when she understands that M. Paul has been shown them too. His angry looks say he knows what is in them.
The correspondence itself is already over. Dr John's attention has turned. Lucy grieves with a force that surprises her, then gathers the old habit of keeping still. She means to do more than hide the letters. She means to bury a grief. In the allée she clears ivy from a hole large enough for a jar, thrusts the jar deep, and fetches a slate from the masons' leavings in the tool-shed to cover it.
She is not a woman who can be set, like a foil, beside someone else's jewel. Madame Beck leaves her free and ties her to no child's side. That freedom looks to Paul like fluttering. One morning he steps up and whispers that he has his eye on her, that he will not leave her to her own devices, and that Madame is to blame for allowing such unsettled proceedings in a teacher of the house.
The nun is in the garden again. Lucy watches the figure and has no Dr John to tell. Paulina, in the same stretch of days, offers her a companion's place at triple the salary. Lucy declines. She will not bind herself to a household where she must watch, every day, a happiness she is not inside. The burial is not a mood. It is a sequence of objects: the letters wrapped as if in a winding-sheet, the jar, the ivy pulled back, the hole under the alley, the slate brought from the masons' rubbish. Lucy wants them unreadable. Paul's whisper the next morning shows her they are not unreadable to him. He has appointed himself the friend who will supervise her unsettled proceedings. Between that whisper and Paulina's offer of a companion's wage, Lucy chooses the desk she already has. The nun in the shrubbery leaves her with a sight she will not carry to the salle-à-manger this time.
