'My dear Mr. Kane, I do congratulate you,' Helen said.

FRANKLIN

KANE

BY

ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK

(MRS. BASIL DE SÉLINCOURT)

T. NELSON & SONS
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
PARIS: 189, rue Saint-Jacques
LEIPZIG: 35-37 Königstrasse

CONTENTS

FRANKLIN KANE.

CHAPTER I.

Miss Althea Jakes was tired after her long journey from Basle. It was a brilliant summer afternoon, and though the shutters were half closed on the beating Parisian sunlight, the hotel sitting-room looked, in its brightness, hardly shadowed. Unpinning her hat, laying it on the table beside her, passing her hands over the undisordered folds of her hair, Miss Jakes looked about her at the old-gold brocade of the furniture, the many mirrors in ornate gold frames, the photographs from Bougereau, the long, crisp lace curtains. It was the same sitting-room that she had had last year, the same that she had had the year before last—the same, indeed, to which she had been conducted on her first stay at the Hôtel Talleyrand, eight years ago. The brocade looked as new, the gilded frames as glittering, the lace curtains as snowy as ever. Everything was as she had always seen it, from the ugly Satsuma vases flanking the ugly bronze clock on the mantelpiece, to the sheaf of pink roses lying beside her in their white paper wrappings. Even Miss Harriet Robinson's choice of welcoming flowers was the same. So it had always been, and so, no doubt, it would continue to be for many years to come; and she, no doubt, for many summers, would arrive from Basle to sit, jadedly, looking at it.

Amélie, her maid, was unpacking in the next room; the door was ajar, and Miss Jakes could hear the creaking of lifted trays and the rustling of multitudinous tissue-paper layers. The sounds suggested an answer to a dim question that had begun to hover in her travel-worn mind. One came back every summer to the Hôtel Talleyrand for the purpose of getting clothes; that, perhaps, was a sufficient answer. Yet, to-day, it did not seem sufficient. She was not really so very much interested in her clothes; not nearly enough interested to make them a compensation for such fatigue and loneliness as she was now feeling. And as she realised this, a further question followed: in what was she particularly interested? What was a sufficient motive for all the European journeyings with which her life, for the past ten or twelve years, had been filled? In a less jaded mood, in her usual mood of mild, if rather wistful, assurance, she would have answered at once that she was interested in everything—in everything that was of the best—pictures, music, places, and people. These surely were her objects.

She was that peculiarly civilised being, the American woman of independent means and discriminating tastes, whose cosmopolitan studies and acquaintances give, in their multiplicity, the impression of a full, if not a completed, life. But to-day the gloomy question hovered: was not the very pilgrimage to Bayreuth, the study of archæology in Rome, and of pictures in Florence, of much the same nature as the yearly visit to Paris for clothes? What was attained by it all? Was it not something merely superficial, to be put on and worn, as it were, not to be lived for with a growing satisfaction? Miss Jakes did not answer this question; she dismissed it with some indignation, and she got up and rang rather sharply for tea, which was late; and after asking the garçon, with a smile that in its gentleness contrasted with the sharpness of the pull, that it might be brought at once, she paused near the table to lean over and smell her sheaf of roses, and to read again, listlessly, Miss Harriet Robinson's words of affectionate greeting. Miss Robinson was a middle-aged American lady who lived in Paris, and had long urged Althea to settle there near her. Ten years ago, when she had first met Miss Robinson in Boston, Althea had thought her a brilliant and significant figure; but she had by now met too many of her kind—in Rome, in Florence, in Dresden—to feel any wish for a more intimate relationship. She was fond of Miss Robinson, but she prayed that fate did not reserve for her a withering to the like brisk, colourless spinsterhood. This hope, the necessity for such hope, was the final depth of her gloomy mood, and she found herself looking at something very dark as she stood holding Miss Robinson's expensive roses. For, after all, what was going to become of her? The final depth shaped itself to-day in more grimly realistic fashion than ever before: what was she going to do with herself, in the last resort, unless something happened? Her mind dwelt upon all the visible alternatives. There was philanthropic lunch-going and lunch-giving spinsterhood in Boston; there was spinsterhood in Europe, semi-social, semi-intellectual, and monotonous in its very variety, for Althea had come to feel change as monotonous; or there was spinsterhood in England established near her friend, Miss Buckston, who raised poultry in the country, and went up to London for Bach choir practices and Woman's Suffrage meetings. Althea couldn't see herself as taking an interest in poultry or in Woman's Suffrage, nor did she feel herself fitted for patriotic duties in Boston. There was nothing for it, then, but to continue her present nomadic life. After seeing herself shut in to this conclusion, it was a real relief to her to hear the tea-tray chink outside, and to see it enter, high on the garçon's shoulder, as if with a trivial but cheerful reply to her dreary questionings. Tea, at all events, would always happen and always be pleasant. Althea smiled sadly as she made the reflection, for she was not of an Epicurean temperament. After she had drunk her tea she felt strengthened to go in and ask Amélie about her clothes. She might have to get a great many new ones, especially if she went home for the autumn and winter, as she half intended to do. She took up the roses, as she passed them, to show to Amélie. Amélie was a bony, efficient Frenchwoman, with high cheek-bones and sleek black hair. She had come to Althea first, many years ago, as a courier-maid, to take her back to America. Althea's mother had died in Dresden, and Althea had been equipped by anxious friends with this competent attendant for her sad return journey. Amélie had proved intelligent and reliable in the highest degree, and though she had made herself rather disagreeable during her first year in Boston, she had stayed on ever since. She still made herself disagreeable from time to time, and Althea had sometimes lacked only the courage to dismiss her; but she could hardly imagine herself existing without Amélie, and in Europe Amélie was seldom disagreeable. In Europe, at the worst, she was gruff and ungracious, and Althea was fond enough of her to ignore these failings, although they frightened her a little; but though an easily intimidated person, and much at a loss in meeting opposition or rudeness, she was also tenacious. She might be frightened, but people could never make her do what she didn't want to do, not even Amélie. Her relations with Amélie were slightly strained just now, for she had not taken her advice as to their return journey from Venice. Amélie had insisted on Mont Cenis, and Althea had chosen the St. Gothard; so that it was as a measure of propitiation that she selected three of the roses for Amélie as she went into the bedroom. Amélie, who was kneeling before one of the larger boxes and carefully lifting skirts from its trays, paused to sniff at the flowers, and to express a terse thanks and admiration. 'Ah, bien merci, mademoiselle,' she said, laying her share on the table beside her.

She was not very encouraging about the condition of Althea's wardrobe.

'Elles sont défraîchies—démodées—en vérité, mademoiselle,' she replied, when Althea asked if many new purchases were necessary.

Althea sighed. 'All the fittings!'

'Il faut souffrir pour être belle,' said Amélie unsympathetically.

Althea had not dared yet to tell her that she might be going back to America that winter. The thought of Amélie's gloom cast a shadow over the project, and she could not yet quite face it. She wandered back to the sitting-room, and, thinking of Amélie's last words, she stood for some time and looked at herself in the large mirror which rose from mantelpiece to cornice, enclosed in cascades of gilt. One of the things that Althea, in her mild assurance, was really secure of—for, as we have intimated, her assurance often covered a certain insecurity—was her own appearance. She didn't know about 'belle,' that seemed rather a trivial term, and the English equivalent better to express the distinctive characteristic of her face. She had so often been told she was nobly beautiful that she did not see herself critically, and she now leaned her elbow on the mantelpiece and gazed at herself with sad approbation. The mirror reflected only her head and shoulders, and Miss Jakes's figure could not, even by a partisan, have been described as beautiful; she was short, and though immature in outline, her form was neither slender nor graceful. Althea did not feel these defects, and was well satisfied with her figure, especially with her carriage, which was full of dignity; but it was her head that best pleased her, and her head, indeed, had aspects of great benignity and sweetness. It was a large head, crowned with coils of dull gold hair; her clothing followed the fashions obediently, but her fashion of dressing her hair did not vary, and the smooth parting, the carved ripples along her brow became her, though they did not become her stiffly conventional attire. Her face, though almost classic in its spaces and modelling, lacked in feature the classic decision and amplitude, so that the effect was rather that of a dignified room meagrely furnished. For these deficiencies, however, Miss Jakes's eyes might well be accepted as atonement. They were large, dark, and innocent; they lay far apart, heavily lidded and with wistful eyebrows above them; their expression varied easily from lucid serenity to a stricken, expectant look, like that of a threatened doe, and slight causes could make Miss Jakes's eyes look stricken. They did not look stricken now, but they looked profoundly melancholy.

Here she stood, in the heartless little French sitting-room, meaning so well, so desirous of the best, yet alone, uncertain of any aim, and very weary of everything.

CHAPTER II.

Althea, though a cosmopolitan wanderer, had seldom stayed in an hotel unaccompanied. She did not like, now, going down to the table d'hôte dinner alone, and was rather glad that her Aunt Julia and Aunt Julia's two daughters were to arrive in Paris next week. It was really almost the only reason she had for being glad of Aunt Julia's arrival, and she could imagine no reason for being glad of the girls'. Tiresome as it was to think of going to tea with Miss Harriet Robinson, to think of hearing from her all the latest gossip, and all the latest opinions of the latest books and pictures—alert, mechanical appreciations with which Miss Robinson was but too ready—it was yet more tiresome to look forward to Aunt Julia's appreciations, which were dogmatic and often belated, and to foresee that she must run once more the gauntlet of Aunt Julia's disapproval of expatriated Americans. Althea was accustomed to these assaults and met them with weary dignity, at times expostulating: 'It is all very well for you, Aunt Julia, who have Uncle Tom and the girls; I have nobody, and all my friends are married.' But this brought upon her an invariable retort: 'Well, why don't you get married then? Franklin Winslow Kane asks nothing better.' This retort angered Althea, but she was too fond of Franklin Winslow Kane to reply that perhaps she, herself, did ask something better. So that it was as a convenience, and not as a comfort, that she looked forward to Aunt Julia; and to the girls she did not look forward at all. They were young, ebullient, slangy; they belonged to a later generation than her own, strange to her in that it seemed weighted with none of the responsibilities and reverences that she had grown up among. It was a generation that had no respect for and no anxiety concerning Europe; that played violent outdoor games, and went without hats in summer.

The dining-room was full when she went down to dinner, her inward tremor of shyness sustained by the consciousness of the perfect fit and cut of her elaborate little dress. People sat at small tables, and the general impression was one of circumspection and withdrawal. Most of the occupants were of Althea's type—richly dressed, quiet-voiced Americans, careful of their own dignity and quick at assessing other people's. A French family loudly chattered and frankly stared in one corner; for the rest, all seemed to be compatriots.

But after Althea had taken her seat at her own table near the pleasantly open window, and had consulted the menu and ordered a half-bottle of white wine, another young woman entered and went to the last vacant table left in the room, the table next Althea's—so near, indeed, that the waiter found some difficulty in squeezing himself between them when he presented the carte des vins to the newcomer.

She was not an American, Althea felt sure of this at once, and the mere negation was so emphatic that it almost constituted, for the first startled glance, a complete definition. But, glancing again and again, while she ate her soup, Althea realised there were so many familiar things the newcomer was not, that she seemed made up of differences. The fact that she was English—she spoke to the waiter absent-mindedly in that tongue—did not make her less different, for she was like no English person that Althea had ever seen. She engaged at once the whole of her attention, but at first Althea could not have said whether this attention were admiring; her main impression was of oddity, of something curiously arresting and noticeable.

The newcomer sat in profile to Althea, her back to the room, facing the open window, out of which she gazed vaguely and unseeingly. She was dressed in black, a thin dress, rather frayed along the edges—an evening dress; though, as a concession to Continental custom, she had a wide black scarf over her bare shoulders. She sat, leaning forward, her elbows on the table, and once, when she glanced round and found Althea's eyes fixed on her, she looked back for a moment, but with something of the same vagueness and unseeingness with which she looked out of the window.

She was very odd. An enemy might say that she had Chinese eyes and a beak-like nose. The beak was small, as were all the features—delicately, decisively placed in the pale, narrow face—yet it jutted over prominently, and the long eyes were updrawn at the outer corners and only opened widely with an effect of effort. She had quantities of hair, dense and dark, arranged with an ordered carelessness, and widely framing her face and throat. She was very thin, and she seemed very tired; and fatigue, which made Althea look wistful, made this young lady look bored and bitter. Her grey eyes, perhaps it was the strangeness of their straight-drawn upper lids, were dazed and dim in expression. She ate little, leaned limply on her elbows, and sometimes rubbed her hands over her face, and sat so, her fingers in her hair, for a languid moment. Dinner was only half over when she rose and went away, her black dress trailing behind her, and a moon-like space of neck visible between her heavily-clustered hair and the gauze scarf.

Althea could not have said why, but for the rest of the meal, and after she had gone back to her sitting-room, the thought of the young lady in black remained almost oppressively with her.

She had felt empty and aimless before seeing her; since seeing her she felt more empty, more aimless than ever. It was an absurd impression, and she tried to shake it off with the help of a recent volume of literary criticism, but it coloured her mind as though a drop of some potent chemical had been tipped into her uncomfortable yet indefinable mood, and had suddenly made visible in it all sorts of latent elements.

It was curious to feel, as a deep conviction about a perfect stranger, that though the young lady in black might often know moods, they would never be undefined ones; to be sure that, however little she had, she would always accurately know what she wanted. The effect of seeing some one so hard, so clear, so alien, was much as if, a gracefully moulded but fragile earthenware pot, she had suddenly, while floating down the stream, found herself crashing against the bronze vessel of the fable.

A corrective to this morbid state of mind came to her with the evening post, and in the form of a thick letter bearing the Boston postmark. Franklin Winslow Kane had not occurred to Althea as an alternative to the various forms of dignified extinction with which her imagination had been occupied that afternoon. Franklin often occurred to her as a solace, but he never occurred to her as an escape.

He was a young man of very homespun extraction, who hovered in Boston on the ambiguous verge between the social and the scholastic worlds; the sort of young man whom one asked to tea rather than to dinner. He was an earnest student, and was attached to the university by an official, though unimportant, tie. A physicist, and, in his own sober way, with something of a reputation, he was profoundly involved in theories that dealt with the smallest things and the largest—molecules and the formation of universes.

He had first proposed to Althea when she was eighteen. She was now thirty-three, and for all these years Franklin had proposed to her on every occasion that offered itself. He was deeply, yet calmly, determinedly, yet ever so patiently, in love with her; and while other more eligible and more easily consoled aspirants had drifted away and got married and become absorbed in their growing families, Franklin alone remained admirably faithful. She had never given him any grounds for expecting that she might some day marry him, yet he evidently found it impossible to marry anybody else. This was the touching fact about Franklin, the one bright point, as it were, in his singularly colourless personality. His fidelity was like a fleck of orange on the wing of some grey, unobtrusive moth; it made him visible.

Althea's compassionate friendship seemed to sustain him sufficiently on his way; he did not pine or protest, though he punctually requested. He frequently appeared and he indefatigably wrote, and his long constancy, the unemotional trust and closeness of their intimacy, made him seem less a lover than the American husband of tradition, devoted and uncomplaining, who had given up hoping that his wife would ever come home and live with him.

Althea rather resented this aspect of their relation; she was well aware of its comicality; but though Franklin's devotion was at times something of a burden, though she could expect from him none of the glamour of courtship, she could ill have dispensed with his absorption in her. Franklin's absorption in her was part of her own personality; she would hardly have known herself without it; and her relation to him, irksome, even absurd as she sometimes found it, was perhaps the one thing in her life that most nearly linked her to reality; it was a mirage, at all events, of the responsible affections that her life lacked.

And now, in her mood of positive morbidity, the sight of Franklin's handwriting on the thick envelope brought her the keenest sense she had ever had of his value. One might have no aim oneself, yet to be some one else's aim saved one from that engulfing consciousness of nonentity; one might be uncertain and indefinite, but a devotion like Franklin's really defined one. She must be significant, after all, since this very admirable person—admirable, though ineligible—had found her so for so many years. It was with a warming sense of restoration, almost of reconstruction, that she opened the letter, drew out the thickly-folded sheets of thin paper and began to read the neat, familiar writing. He told her everything that he was doing and thinking, and about everything that interested him. He wrote to her of kinetics and atoms as if she had been a fellow-student. It was as if, helplessly, he felt the whole bulk of his outlook to be his only chance of interesting her, since no detail was likely to do so. Unfortunately it didn't interest her much. Franklin's eagerness about some local election, or admiration for some talented pupil, or enthusiasm in regard to a new theory that delved deeper and circled wider than any before, left her imagination inert, as did he. But to-night all these things were transformed by the greatness of her own need and of her own relief. And when she read that Franklin was to be in Europe in six weeks' time, and that he intended to spend some months there, and, if she would allow it, as near her as was possible, a sudden hope rose in her and seemed almost a joy.

Was it so impossible, after all, as an alternative? Equipped with her own outlooks, with her wider experience, and with her ample means, might not dear Franklin be eligible? To sink back on Franklin, after all these years, would be, of course, to confess to failure; but even in failure there were choices, and wasn't this the best form of failure? Franklin was not, could never be, the lover she had dreamed of; she had never met that lover, and she had always dreamed of him. Franklin was dun-coloured; the lover of her dreams a Perseus-like flash of purple and gold, ardent, graceful, compelling, some one who would open doors to large, bright vistas, and lead her into a life of beauty. But this was a dream and Franklin was the fact, and to-night he seemed the only fact worth looking at. Wasn't dun-colour, after all, preferable to the trivial kaleidoscope of shifting tints which was all that the future, apart from Franklin, seemed to offer her? Might not dun-colour, even, illuminated by joy, turn to gold, like highway dust when the sun shines upon it? Althea wondered, leaning back in her chair and gazing before her; she wondered deeply.

If only Franklin would come in now with the right look. If only he would come in with the right word, or, if not with the word, with an even more compelling silence! Compulsion was needed, and could Franklin compel? Could he make her fall in love with him? So she wondered, sitting alone in the Paris hotel, the open letter in her hand.

CHAPTER III.

When Althea went in to lunch next day, after an arduous morning of shopping, she observed, with mingled relief and disappointment, that the young lady in black was not in her place. She might very probably have gone away, and it was odd to think that an impression so strong was probably to remain an impression merely. On the whole, she was sorry to think that it might be so, though the impression had not been altogether happy.

After lunch she lay down and read reviews for a lazy hour, and then dressed to receive Miss Harriet Robinson, who, voluble and beaming, arrived punctually at four.

Miss Robinson looked almost exactly as she had looked for the last ten years. She changed as little as the hotel drawing-room, but that the pictures on the wall, the vases on the shelf of her mental decoration varied with every season. She was always passionately interested in something, and it was surprising to note how completely in the new she forgot last year's passion. This year it was eugenics and Strauss; the welfare of the race had suddenly engaged her attention, and the menaced future of music. She was slender, erect, and beautifully dressed. Her hands were small, and she constantly but inexpressively gesticulated with them; her elaborately undulated hair looked like polished, fluted silver; her eyes were small, dark, and intent; she smiled as constantly and as inexpressively as she gesticulated.

'And so you really think of going back for the winter?' she asked Althea finally, when the responsibilities of parenthood and the impermanency of modern musical artifices had been demonstrated. 'Why, my dear? You see everybody here. Everybody comes here, sooner or later.'

'I don't like getting out of touch with home,' said Althea.

'I confess that I feel this home,' said Miss Robinson. 'America is so horribly changed, so vulgarised. The people they accept socially! And the cost of things! My dear, the last time I went to the States I had to pay five hundred francs—one hundred dollars—for my winter hat! Je vous demande! If they will drive us out they must take the consequences.'

Althea felt tempted to inquire what these might be. Miss Robinson sometimes roused a slight irony in her; but she received the expostulation with a dim smile.

'Why won't you settle here?' Miss Robinson continued, 'or in Rome—there is quite a delightful society in Rome—or Florence, or London. Not that I could endure the English winter.'

'I've sometimes thought of England,' said Althea.

'Well, do think of it. I'm perfectly disinterested. Rather than have you unsettled, I would like to have you settled there. You have interesting friends, I know.'

'Yes, very interesting,' said Althea, with some satisfaction.

'You would probably make quite a place for yourself in London, if you went at it carefully and consideringly, and didn't allow the wrong sort of people to accaparer you. We always count, when we want to, we American women of the good type,' said Miss Robinson, with frank complacency; 'and I don't see why, with your gifts and charm, you shouldn't have a salon, political or artistic.'

Althea was again tempted to wonder what it was Miss Robinson counted for; but since she had often been told that her gifts and charm demanded a salon, she was inclined to believe it. 'It's only,' she demurred, 'that I have so many friends, in so many places; it is hard to decide on settling.'

'One never does make a real life for oneself until one does settle. I've found that out for myself,' said Miss Robinson.

It did not enter into her mind that Althea might still settle, in a different sense. She was of that vast army of rootless Europeanised Americans, who may almost be said to belong to a celibate order, so little does the question of matrimony and family life affect their existence. For a younger, more frivolous type, Europe might have a merely matrimonial significance; but to Miss Robinson, and to thousands of her kind, it meant an escape from displeasing circumstance and a preoccupation almost monastic with the abstract and the æsthetic. To Althea it had never meant merely that. Her own people in America were fastidious and exclusive; from choice, they considered, but, in reality, partly from necessity; they had never been rich enough or fashionable enough to be exposed to the temptation of great European alliances. Althea would have scorned such ambitions as basely vulgar; she had never thought of Europe as an arena for social triumphs; but it had assuredly been coloured for her with the colour of romance. It was in Europe, rather than in America, that she expected to find, if ever, her ardent, compelling wooer. And it irritated her a little that Miss Robinson should not seem to consider such a possibility for her.

She did not accept her friend's invitation to go with her to the Français that evening; the weariness of the morning of shopping was her excuse. She wanted to study a little; she never neglected to keep her mind in training; and after dinner she sat down with a stout tome on political economy. She had only got through half a chapter when Amélie came to her and asked her if she could suggest a remedy for a young lady next door who, the femme de chambre said, was quite alone, and had evidently succumbed to a violent attack of influenza.

'C'est une dame anglaise,' said Amélie, 'et une bien gentille.'

Althea sprang up, strangely excited. Was it the lady in black? Had she then not gone yet? 'Next door, you say?' she asked. Yes; the stranger's bedroom was next her own, and she had no salon.

'I will go in myself and see her,' said Althea, after a moment of reflection.

She was not at all given to such impulses, and, under any other circumstances, would have sent Amélie with the offer of assistance. But she suddenly felt it an opportunity, for what she could not have said. It was like seeing a curious-looking book opened before one; one wanted to read in it, if only a snatched paragraph here and there.

Amélie protested as to infection, but Althea was a resourceful traveller and had disinfectants for every occasion. She drenched her handkerchief, gargled her throat, and, armed with her little case of remedies, knocked at the door near by. A languid voice answered her and she entered.

The room was lighted by two candles that stood on the mantelpiece, and the bed in its alcove was dim. Tossed clothes lay on the chairs; a battered box stood open, its tray lying on the floor; the dressing-table was in confusion, and the scent of cigarette smoke mingled with that of a tall white lily that was placed in a vase on a little table beside the bed. To the well-maided Althea the disorder was appalling, yet it expressed, too, something of charm. The invalid lay plunged in her pillows, her dark hair tossed above her head, and, as Althea approached, she did not unclose her eyes.

'Oh, I beg your pardon,' said Althea, feeling some trepidation. 'My maid told me that you were ill—that you had influenza, and I know just what to do for it. May I give you some medicine? I do hope I have not waked you up,' for the invalid was now looking at her with some astonishment.

'No; I wasn't asleep. How very kind of you. I thought it was the chambermaid,' she said. 'Forgive me for seeming so rude.'

Her eyes were more dazed than ever, and she more mysterious, with her unbound hair.

'You oughtn't to lie with your arms outside the covers like that,' said Althea. 'It's most important not to get chilled. I'm afraid you don't know how to take care of yourself.' She smiled a little, gentle and assured, though inwardly with still a tremor; and she drew the clothes about the invalid, who had relapsed passively on to her pillows.

'I'm afraid I don't. How very kind of you!' she murmured again.

Althea brought a glass of water and, selecting her little bottle, poured out the proper number of drops. 'You were feeling ill last night, weren't you?' she said, after the dose had been swallowed. 'I thought that you looked ill.'

'Last night?'

'Yes, don't you remember? I sat next you in the dining-room.'

'Oh yes; of course, of course! I remember now. You had this dress on; I noticed all the little silver tassels. Yes, I've been feeling wretched for several days; I've done hardly anything—no shopping, no sight-seeing, and I ought to be back in London to-morrow; but I suppose I'll have to stay in bed for a week; it's very tiresome.' She spoke wearily, yet in decisive little sentences, and her voice, its hardness and its liquid intonations, made Althea think of wet pebbles softly shaken together.

'You haven't sent for a doctor?' she inquired, while she took out her small clinical thermometer.

'No, indeed; I never send for doctors. Can't afford 'em,' said the young lady, with a wan grimace. 'Must I put that into my mouth?'

'Yes, please; I must take your temperature. I think, if you let me prescribe for you, I can see after you as well as a doctor,' Althea assured her. 'I'm used to taking care of people who are ill. The friend I've just been staying with in Venice had influenza very badly while I was with her.'

She rather hoped, after the thermometer was removed, that the young lady would ask her some question about Venice and her present destination; but, though so amiable and so grateful, she did not seem to feel any curiosity about the good Samaritan who thus succoured her.

Althea found her patient less feverish next morning when she went in early to see her, and though she said that her body felt as though it were being beaten with red-hot hammers, she smiled in saying it, and Althea then, administering her dose, asked her what her name might be.

It was Helen Buchanan, she learned.

'And mine is Althea Jakes. You are English, aren't you?'

'Oh no, I'm Scotch,' said Miss Buchanan.

'And I am American. Do you know any Americans?'

'Oh yes, quite a lot. One of them is a Mrs. Harrison, and lives in Chicago,' said Miss Buchanan, who seemed in a more communicative mood. 'I met her in Nice one winter; a very nice, kind woman, who gives most sumptuous parties. Her husband is a millionaire; one never sees him. Do you come from Chicago? Do you know her?'

Althea, with some emphasis, said that she came from Boston.

'Another,' Miss Buchanan pursued, 'lives in New York, though she is usually over here; she is immensely rich, too. She hunts every winter in England, and is great fun and is frightfully well up in everything—pictures, books, music, you know: Americans usually are well up, aren't they? She wants me to stay with her some day in New York; perhaps I shall, if I can manage to afford the voyage. Her name is Bigham; perhaps you know her.'

'No. I know of her, though; she is very well known,' said Althea rather coldly; for Mrs. Bigham was an excessively fashionable and reputedly reckless lady who had divorced one husband and married another, and whose doings filled more scrupulous circles with indignation and unwilling interest.

'Then I met a dear little woman in Oxford once,' said Miss Buchanan. 'She was studying there—she had come from a college in America. She was so nice and clever, and charming, too; quaint and full of flavour. She was going to teach in a college when she went back. She was very poor, quite different from the others. Her father, she told me, kept a shop, but didn't get on at all; and her brother, to whom she was devoted, sold harmoniums. It was just like an American novel. Wayman was her name—Miss Carrie Wayman; perhaps you know her. I forget the name of the town she came from, but it was somewhere in the western part of America.'

No, Althea said, she did not know Miss Wayman, and she felt some little severity for the confusion that Miss Buchanan's remarks indicated. With greater emphasis than before, she said that she did not know the West at all.

'It must be rather nice—plains and cowboys and Rocky Mountains,' Miss Buchanan said. 'I've a cousin on a ranch in Dakota, and I've often thought I'd like to go out there for a season; he says the riding is wonderful, and the scenery and flowers. Oh, my wretched head; it feels as if it were stuffed with incandescent cotton-wool.'

'You must remember to keep your arms under the covers,' said Althea, as Miss Buchanan lifted her hands and pressed them to her brows. 'And let me plait your hair for you; it must be so hot and uncomfortable.'

And now again, looking up at her while the friendly office was performed, Miss Buchanan said, 'How kind you are! too kind for words. I can't think what I should have done without you.'

CHAPTER IV.

It became easy after this for Althea to carry into effect all her beneficent wishes. The friends who had taken Miss Buchanan to the Riviera had gone on to London, leaving her alone in Paris for a week's shopping, and there was no one else to look after her. She brought her fruit and flowers and sat with her in all her spare moments. The feeling of anxiety that had oppressed her on the evening of gloom when she had first seen her was transformed into a soft and delightful perturbation. As the unknown lady in black Miss Buchanan had indeed charmed as well as oppressed her, and the charm grew while the oppression, though it still hovered, was felt more as a sense of alluring mystery. She had never in her life met any one in the least like Miss Buchanan. She was at once so open and so impenetrable. She replied to all questions with complete unreserve, but she had never, with all her candour, the air of making confidences. It hurt Althea a little, and yet was part of the allurement, to see that she was, probably, too indifferent to be reticent. Lying on her pillows, a cigarette—all too frequently, Althea considered—between her lips, and her hair wound in a heavy wreath upon her head, she would listen pleasantly, and as pleasantly reply; and Althea could not tell whether it was because she really found it pleasant to talk and be talked to, or whether, since she had nothing better to do, she merely showed good manners. Althea was sensitive to every shade in manners, and was sure that Miss Buchanan, however great her tact might be, did not find her a bore; yet she could not be at all sure that she found her interesting, and this disconcerted her. Sometimes the suspicion of it made her feel humble, and sometimes it made her feel a little angry, for she was not accustomed to being found uninteresting. She herself, however, was interested; and it was when she most frankly owned to this, laying both anger and humility aside, that she was happiest in the presence of her new acquaintance. She liked to talk to her, and she liked to make her talk. From these conversations she was soon able to build up a picture of Miss Buchanan's life. She came of an old Scotch family, and she had spent her childhood and girlhood in an old Scotch house. This house, Althea was sure, she really did enjoy talking about. She described it to Althea: the way the rooms lay, and the passages ran, and the queer old stairs climbed up and down. She described the ghost that she herself had seen once—her matter-of-fact acceptance of the ghost startled Althea—and the hills and moors that one looked out on from the windows. Led by Althea's absorbed inquiries, she drifted on to detailed reminiscence—the dogs she had cared for, the flowers she had grown, and the dear red lacquer mirror that she had broken. 'Papa did die that year,' she added, after mentioning the incident.

'Surely you don't connect the two things,' said Althea, who felt some remonstrance necessary. Miss Buchanan said no, she supposed not; it was silly to be superstitious; yet she didn't like breaking mirrors.

Her brother lived in the house now. He had married some one she didn't much care about, though she did not enlarge on this dislike. 'Nigel had to marry money,' was all she said. 'He couldn't have kept the place going if he hadn't. Jessie isn't at all a bad sort, and they get on very well and have three nice little boys; but I don't much take to her nor she to me, so that I'm not much there any more.'

'And your mother?' Althea questioned, 'where does she live? Don't you stay with her ever?' She had gathered that the widowed Mrs. Buchanan was very pretty and very selfish, but she was hardly prepared for the frankness with which Miss Buchanan defined her own attitude towards her.

'Oh, I can't stand Mamma,' she said; 'we don't get on at all. I'm not fond of rowdy people, and Mamma knows such dreadful bounders. So long as people have plenty of money and make things amusing for her, she'll put up with anything.'

Althea had all the American reverence for the sanctities and loyalties of the family, and these ruthless explanations filled her with uneasy surprise. Miss Buchanan was ruthless about all her relatives; there were few of them, apparently, that she cared for except the English cousins with whom she had spent many years of girlhood, and the Aunt Grizel who made a home for her in London. To her she alluded with affectionate emphasis: 'Oh, Aunt Grizel is very different from the rest of them.'

Aunt Grizel was not well off, but it was she who made Helen the little allowance that enabled her to go about; and she had insured her life, so that at her death, when her annuity lapsed, Helen should be sure of the same modest sum. 'Owing to Aunt Grizel I'll just not starve,' said Helen, with the faint grimace, half bitter, half comic, that sometimes made her strange face still stranger. 'One hundred and fifty pounds a year: think of it! Isn't it damnable? Yet it's better than nothing, as Aunt Grizel and I often say after groaning together.'

Althea, safely niched in her annual three thousand, was indeed horrified.

'One hundred and fifty,' she repeated helplessly. 'Do you mean that you manage to dress on that now?'

'Dress on it, my dear! I pay all my travelling expenses, my cabs, my stamps, my Christmas presents—everything out of it, as well as buy my clothes. And it will have to pay for my rent and food besides, when Aunt Grizel dies—when I'm not being taken in somewhere. Of course, she still counts on my marrying, poor dear.'

'Oh, but, of course you will marry,' said Althea, with conviction.

Miss Buchanan, who was getting much better, was propped high on her pillows to-day, and was attired in a most becoming flow of lace and silk. Nothing less exposed to the gross chances of the world could be imagined. She did not turn her eyes on her companion as the confident assertion was made, and she kept silence for a moment. Then she answered placidly:

'Of course, if I'm to live—and not merely exist—I must try to, I suppose.'

Althea was taken aback and pained by the wording of this speech. Her national susceptibilities were again wounded by the implication that a rare and beautiful woman—for so she termed Helen Buchanan—might be forced, not only to hope for marriage, but to seek it; the implication that urgency lay rather in the woman's state than in the man's. She had all the romantic American confidence in the power of the rare and beautiful woman to marry when and whom she chose.

'I am sure you need never try,' she said with warmth. 'I'm sure you have dozens of delightful people in love with you.'

Miss Buchanan turned her eyes on her and laughed as though she found this idea amusing. 'Why, in heaven's name, should I have dozens of delightful people in love with me?'

'You are so lovely, so charming, so distinguished.'

'Am I? Thanks, my dear. I'm afraid you see things en couleur de rose.' And, still smiling, her eyes dwelling on Althea with their indifferent kindness, she went on: 'Have you delightful dozens in love with you?'

Althea did not desert her guns. She felt that the very honour of their sex—hers and Helen's—was on trial in her person. She might not be as lovely as her friend—though she might be; that wasn't a matter for her to inquire into; but as woman—as well-bred, highly educated, refined and gentle woman—she, too, was chooser, and not seeker.

'Only one delightful person is in love with me at this moment, I'm sorry to say,' she answered, smiling back; 'but I've had very nearly my proper share in the past.' It had been necessary thus to deck poor Franklin out if her standpoint were to be maintained; and, indeed, could not one deem him delightful, in some senses—in moral senses; he surely was delightfully good. The little effort to see dear Franklin's goodness as delightful rather discomposed her, and as Miss Buchanan asked no further question as to the one delightful suitor, the little confusion mounted to her eyes and cheeks. She wondered if she had spoken tastelessly, and hastened away from this personal aspect of the question.

'You don't really mean—I'm sure you don't mean that you would marry just for money.'

Miss Buchanan kept her ambiguous eyes half merrily, half pensively upon her. 'Of course, if he were very nice. I wouldn't marry a man who wasn't nice for money.'

'Surely you couldn't marry a man unless you were in love with him?'

'Certainly I could. Money lasts, and love so often doesn't.' Helen continued to smile as she spoke.

There was now a tremor of pain in Althea's protest. 'Dear Miss Buchanan, I can't bear to hear you speak like that. I can't bear to think of any one so lovely doing anything so sordid, so miserable, as making a mariage de convenance.' Tears rose to her eyes.

Miss Buchanan was again silent for a moment, and it was now her turn to look slightly confused. 'It's very nice of you to mind,' she said; and she added, as if to help Althea not to mind, 'But, you see, I am sordid; I am miserable.'

'Sordid? Miserable? Do you mean unhappy?' Poor Althea gazed, full of her most genuine distress.

'Oh no; I mean in your sense. I'm a poor creature, quite ordinary and grubby; that's all,' said Miss Buchanan.

They said nothing more of it then, beyond Althea's murmur of now inarticulate protest; but the episode probably remained in Miss Buchanan's memory as something rather puzzling as well as rather pitiful, this demonstration of a feeling so entirely unexpected that she had not known what to do with it.

If, in these graver matters, she distressed Althea, in lesser ones she was continually, if not distressing her, at all events calling upon her, in complete unconsciousness, for readjustments of focus that were sometimes, in their lesser way, painful too. When she asserted that she was not musical, Althea almost suspected her of saying it in order to evade her own descriptions of experiences at Bayreuth. Pleasantly as she might listen, it was sometimes, Althea had discovered, with a restive air masked by a pervasive vagueness; this vagueness usually drifted over her when Althea described experiences of an intellectual or æsthetic nature. It could be no question of evasion, however, when, in answer to a question of Althea's, she said that she hated Paris. Since girlhood Althea had accepted Paris as the final stage in a civilised being's education: the Théâtre Français, the lectures at the Sorbonne, the Louvre and the Cluny, and, for a later age, Anatole France—it seemed almost barbarous to say that one hated the splendid city that clothed, as did no other place in the world, one's body and one's mind. 'How can you hate it?' she inquired. 'It means so much that is intellectual, so much that is beautiful.'

'I suppose so,' said Miss Buchanan. 'I do like to look at it sometimes; the spaces and colour are so nice.'

'The spaces, and what's in them, surely. What is it that you don't like? The French haven't our standards of morality, of course, but don't you think it's rather narrow to judge them by our standards?'

Althea was pleased to set forth thus clearly her own liberality of standard. She sometimes suspected Miss Buchanan of thinking her naïve. But Miss Buchanan now looked a little puzzled, as if it were not this at all that she had meant, and said presently that perhaps it was the women's faces—the well-dressed women. 'I don't mind the poor ones so much; they often look too sharp, but they often look kind and frightfully tired. It is the well-dressed ones I can't put up with. And the men are even more horrid. I always want to spend a week in walking over the moors when I've been here. It leaves a hot taste in my mouth, like some horrid liqueur.'

'But the beauty—the intelligence,' Althea urged. 'Surely you are a little intolerant, to see only people's faces in Paris. Think of the Salon Carrée and the Cluny; they take away the taste of the liqueur. How can one have enough of them?'

Miss Buchanan again demurred. 'Oh, I think I can have enough of them.'

'But you care for pictures, for beautiful things,' said Althea, half vexed and half disturbed. But Miss Buchanan said that she liked having them about her, not having to go and look at them. 'It is so stuffy in museums, too; they always give me a headache. However, I don't believe I really do care about pictures. You see, altogether I've had no education.'

Her education, indeed, contrasted with Althea's well-ordered and elaborate progression, had been lamentable—a mere succession of incompetent governesses. Yet, on pressing her researches, Althea, though finding almost unbelievable voids, felt, more than anything else, tastes sharp and fine that seemed to cut into her own tastes and show her suddenly that she did not really like what she had thought she liked, or that she liked what she had hardly before been aware of. All that Helen could be brought to define was that she liked looking at things in the country: at birds, clouds, and flowers; but though striking Althea as a creature strangely untouched and unmoulded, she struck her yet more strongly as beautifully definite. She marvelled at her indifference to her own shortcomings, and she marvelled at the strength of personality that could so dispense with other people's furnishings.

Among the things that Helen made her see, freshly and perturbingly, was the sheaf of friends in England of whom she had thought with such security when Miss Robinson had spoken of the London salon.

Althea had been trained in a school of severe social caution. Social caution was personified to her in her memory of her mother—a slender, black-garbed lady, with parted grey hair, neatly waved along her brow, and a tortoiseshell lorgnette that she used to raise, mildly yet alarmingly, at foreign tables d'hôtes, for an appraising survey of the company. The memory of this lorgnette operated with Althea as a sort of social standard; it typified delicacy, dignity, deliberation, a scrupulous regard for the claims of heredity, and a scrupulous avoidance of uncertain or all too certain types. Althea felt that she had carried on the tradition worthily. The lorgnette would have passed all her more recent friends—those made with only its inspiration as a guide. She was as careful as her mother as to whom she admitted to her acquaintanceship, eschewing in particular those of her compatriots whose accents or demeanour betrayed them to her trained discrimination as outside the radius of acceptance. But Althea's kindness of heart was even deeper than her caution, and much as she dreaded becoming involved with the wrong sort of people, she dreaded even more hurting anybody's feelings, with the result that once or twice she had made mistakes, and had had, under the direction of Lady Blair, to withdraw in a manner as painful to her feelings as to her pride. 'Oh no, my dear,' Lady Blair had said of some English acquaintances whom Althea had met in Rome, and who had asked her to come and see them in England. 'Quite impossible; most worthy people, I am sure, and no doubt the daughter took honours at Girton—the middle classes are highly educated nowadays; but one doesn't know that sort of people.'

Lady Blair was the widow of a judge, and, in her large velvet drawing-room, a thick fog outside and a number of elderly legal ladies drinking tea about her, Althea had always felt herself to be in the very heart of British social safety. Lady Blair was an old friend of her mother's, and, with Miss Buckston, was her nearest English friend. She also felt safe on the lawn under the mulberry-tree at Grimshaw Rectory, and when ensconced for her long visit in Colonel and Mrs. Colling's little house in Devonshire, where hydrangeas grew against a blue background of sea, and a small white yacht rocked in the bay at the foot of the garden.

It was therefore with some perplexity that, here too, she brought from her interviews with Helen an impression of new standards. They were not drastic and relegating, like those of Lady Blair's; they did not make her feel unsafe as Lady Blair's had done; they merely made her feel that her world was very narrow and she herself rather ingenuous.

Helen herself seemed unaware of standards, and had certainly never experienced any of Althea's anxieties. She had always been safe, partly, Althea had perceived, because she had been born safe, but, in the main, because she was quite indifferent to safety. And with this indifference and this security went the further fact that she had, probably, never been ingenuous. With all her admiration, her affection for her new friend, this sense of the change that she was working in her life sometimes made Althea a little afraid of her, and sometimes a little indignant. She, herself, was perfectly safe in America, and when she felt indignant she asked herself what Helen Buchanan would have done had she been turned into a strange continent with hardly any other guides than the memory of a lorgnette and a Baedeker.

It was when she was bound to answer this question, and to recognise that in such circumstances Miss Buchanan would have gone her way, entirely unperturbed, and entirely sure of her own preferences, that Althea felt afraid of her. In all circumstances, she more and more clearly saw it, Miss Buchanan would impose her own standards, and be oppressed or enlightened by none. Althea had always thought of herself as very calm and strong; it was as calm and strong that Franklin Winslow Kane so worshipped her; but when she talked to Miss Buchanan she had sharp shoots of suspicion that she was, in reality, weak and wavering.

Althea's accounts of her friends in England seemed to interest Miss Buchanan even less than her accounts of Bayreuth. She had met Miss Buckston, but had only a vague and, evidently, not a pleasant impression of her. Lady Blair she had never heard of, nor the inmates of Grimshaw Rectory. The Collings were also blanks, except that Mrs. Colling had an uncle, an old Lord Taunton; and when Althea put forward this identifying fact, Helen said that she knew him and liked him very much.

'I suppose you know a great many people,' said Althea.

Yes, Miss Buchanan replied, she supposed she did. 'Too many, sometimes. One gets sick of them, don't you think? But perhaps your people are more interesting than mine; you travel so much, and seem to know such heaps of them all over the world.'

But Althea, from these interviews, took a growing impression that though Miss Buchanan might be sick of her own people, she would be far more sick of hers.

CHAPTER V.

Miss Buchanan was well on the way to complete recovery, was able to have tea every afternoon with Althea, and to be taken for long drives in the Bois, when Aunt Julia and the girls arrived at the Hôtel Talleyrand.

Mrs. Pepperell was a sister of Althea's mother, and lived soberly and solidly in New York, disapproving as much of millionaires and their manners as of expatriated Americans. She was large and dressed with immaculate precision and simplicity, and had it not been for a homespun quality of mingled benevolence and shrewdness, she might have passed as stately. But Mrs. Pepperell had no wish to appear stately, and was rather intolerant of the pretension in others. Her sharp tongue had indulged itself in a good many sallies on this score at her sister Bessie's expense; Bessie being the lady of the lorgnette, Althea's deceased mother.

Althea, remembering that dear mother so well, all dignified elegance as she had been—too dignified, too elegant, perhaps, to be either so shrewd or so benevolent as her sister—always thought of Aunt Julia as rather commonplace in comparison. Yet, as she followed in her wake on the evening of her arrival, she felt that Aunt Julia was obviously and eminently 'nice.' The one old-fashioned diamond ornament at her throat, the ruffles at her wrist, the gloss of her silver-brown hair, reminded her of her own mother's preferences.

The girls were 'nice,' too, as far as their appearance and breeding went, but Althea found their manners very bad. They were not strident and they were not arrogant, but so much noisiness and so much innocent assurance might, to unsympathetic eyes, seem so. They were handsome girls, fresh-skinned, athletic, tall and slender. They wore beautifully simple white lawn dresses, and their shining fair hair was brushed off their foreheads and tied at the back with black bows in a very becoming fashion, though Althea thought the bows too large and the fashion too obviously local.

Helen was in her old place that night, and she smiled at Althea as she and her party took their places at a table larger and at a little distance. She was to come in for coffee after dinner, so that Althea adjourned introductions. Aunt Julia looked sharply and appraisingly at the black figure, and the girls did not look at all. They were filled with young delight and excitement at the prospect of a three weeks' romp in Paris, among dressmakers, tea-parties, and the opera. 'And Herbert Vaughan is here. I've just had a letter from him, forwarded from London,' Dorothy announced, to which Mildred, with glad emphasis, cried 'Bully!'

Althea sighed, crumbled her bread, and looked out of the window resignedly.

'You mustn't talk slang before Cousin Althea,' said Dorothy.

'What Cousin Althea needs is slang,' said Mildred.

'I shan't lack it with you, shall I, Mildred?' Althea returned, with, a rather chilly smile. She knew that Dorothy and Mildred considered her, as they would have put it, 'A back number'; they liked to draw her out and to shock her. She wanted to make it clear that she wasn't shocked, but that she was wearied. At the same time it was true that Mildred and Dorothy made her uncomfortable in subtler ways; she was, perhaps, a little afraid of them, too. They, too, imposed their own standards, and were oppressed and enlightened by none.

Aunt Julia smiled indulgently at her children, and asked Althea if she did not think that they were looking very well. They certainly were, and Althea had to own it. 'But don't let them overdo their athletics, Aunt Julia,' she said. 'It is such a pity when girls get brawny.'

'I'm brawny; feel my muscle,' said Mildred, stretching a hard young arm across the table. Althea shook her head. She did not like being made conspicuous, and already the girls' loud voices had drawn attention; the French family were all staring.

'Who is the lady in black, Althea?' Mrs. Pepperell asked. 'A friend of yours?'

'Yes, a most charming friend,' said Althea. 'Helen Buchanan is her name; she is Scotch—a very old family—and she is one of the most interesting people I've ever known. You will meet her after dinner. She is coming in to spend the evening.'

'Where did you meet her? How long have you known her?' asked Aunt Julia, evidently unimpressed.

Althea said that she had met her here, but that they had mutual friends, thinking of Miss Buckston in what she felt to be an emergency.

Aunt Julia, with her air of general scepticism as to what she could find so worth while in Europe, often made her embark on definitions and declarations. She could certainly tolerate no uncertainty on the subject of Helen's worth.

'Very odd looking,' said Aunt Julia, while the girls glanced round indifferently at the subject of discussion.

'And peculiarly distinguished looking,' said Althea. 'She makes most people look so half-baked and insignificant.'

'I think it a rather sinister face,' said Aunt Julia. 'And how she slouches! Sit up, Mildred. I don't want you to catch European tricks.'

But, after dinner, Althea felt that Helen made her impression. She was still wan and weak; she said very little, though she smiled very pleasantly, and she sat—as Aunt Julia had said, 'slouched,' yet so gracefully—in a corner of the sofa. The charm worked. The girls felt it, Aunt Julia felt it, though Aunt Julia held aloof from it. Althea saw that Aunt Julia, most certainly, did not interest Helen, but the girls amused her; she liked them. They sat near her and made her laugh by their accounts of their journey, the funny people on the steamer, their plans for the summer, and life in America, as they lived it. Dorothy assured her that she didn't know what fun was till she came to America, and Mildred cried: 'Oh, do come! We'll give you the time of your life!' Helen declared that she hoped some day to experience this climax.

Before going to bed, and attired in her dressing-gown, Althea went to Helen's room to ask her how she felt, but also to see what impression her relatives had made. Helen was languidly brushing her hair, and Althea took the brush from her and brushed it for her.

'Isn't it lamentable,' she said, 'that Aunt Julia, who is full of a certain sort of wise perception about other things, doesn't seem to see at all how bad the children's manners are. She lets them monopolise everybody's attention with the utmost complacency.'

Helen, while her hair was being brushed, put out her hand for her watch and was winding it. 'Have they bad manners?' she said. 'But they are nice girls.'

'Yes, they are nice. But surely you don't like their slang?'

Helen smiled at the recollection of it. 'More fun than a goat,' she quoted. 'Why shouldn't they talk slang?'

'Dear Helen,'—they had come quite happily to Christian names—'surely you care for keeping the language pure. Surely you think it regrettable that the younger generation should defile and mangle it like that.'

But Helen only laughed, and confessed that she really didn't care what happened to the language. 'There'll always be plenty of people to talk it too well,' she said.

Mrs. Pepperell, on her side, had her verdict, and she gave it some days later when she and her niece were driving to the dressmaker's.

'She is a very nice girl, Miss Buchanan, and clever, too, in her quiet English way, though startlingly ignorant. Dorothy actually told me that she had never read any Browning, and thought that Sophocles was Diogenes, and lived in a tub. But frankly, Althea, I can't say that I take to her very much.'

Aunt Julia, often irritating to Althea, was never more so than when, as now, she assumed that her verdicts and opinions were of importance to her niece. Althea shrank from open combat with anybody, yet she could, under cover of gentle candour, plant her shafts. She planted one now in answering: 'I don't think that you would, either of you, take to one another. Helen's flavour is rather recondite.'

'Recondite, my dear,' said Aunt Julia, who never pretended not to know when a shaft had been planted. 'I think, everyday mère de famille as I am, that I am quite capable of appreciating the recondite. Miss Buchanan's appearance is striking, and she is an independent creature; but, essentially, she is the most commonplace type of English girl—well-bred, poor, idle, uneducated, and with no object in life except to amuse herself and find a husband with money. And under that air of sleepy indifference she has a very sharp eye to the main chance, you may take my word for it.'

Althea was very angry, the more so for the distorted truth this judgment conveyed. 'I'm afraid I shouldn't take your word on any matter concerning my friend,' she returned; 'and I think, Aunt Julia, that you forget that it is my friend you are speaking of.'

'My dear, don't lose your temper. I only say it to put you on your guard. You are so given to idealisation, and you may find yourself disappointed if you trust to depths that are not there. As to friendship, don't forget that she is, as yet, the merest acquaintance.'

'One may feel nearer some people in a week than to others after years.'

'As to being near in a week—she doesn't feel near you; that is all I mean. Don't cast your pearls too lavishly.'

Althea made no reply, but under her air of unruffled calm, Aunt Julia's shaft rankled.

She found herself that afternoon, when she and Helen were alone at tea, sounding her, probing her, for reassuring symptoms of warmth or affection. 'I so hope that we may keep really in touch with one another,' she said. 'I couldn't bear not to keep in touch with you, Helen.'

Helen looked at her with the look, vague, kind, and a little puzzled, that seemed to plant Aunt Julia's shaft anew. 'Keep in touch,' she repeated. 'Of course. You'll be coming to England some day, and then you'll be sure to look me up, won't you?'

'But, until I do come, we will write? You will write to me a great deal?'

'Oh, my dear, I do so hate writing. I never have anything to say in a letter. Let us exchange postcards, when our doings require it.'

'Postcards!' Althea could not repress a disconsolate note. 'How can I tell from postcards what you are thinking and feeling?'

'You may always take it for granted that I'm doing very little of either,' said Helen, smiling.

Althea was silent for a moment, and then, with a distress apparent in voice and face, she said: 'I can't bear you to say that.'

Helen still smiled, but she was evidently at a loss. She added some milk to her tea and took a slice of bread and butter before saying, more kindly, yet more lightly than before: 'You mustn't judge me by yourself. I'm not a bit thoughtful, you know, or warm-hearted and intellectual, like you. I just rub along. I'm sure you'll not find it worth while keeping in touch with me.'

'It's merely that I care for you very much,' said Althea, in a slightly quivering voice. 'And I can't bear to think that I am nothing to you.'

There was again a little pause in which, because her eyes had suddenly filled with tears, Althea looked down and could not see her friend. Helen's voice, when she spoke, showed her that she was pained and disconcerted. 'You make me feel like such a clumsy brute when you say things like that,' she said. 'You are so kind, and I am so selfish and self-centred. But of course I care for you too.'

'Do you really?' said Althea, who, even if she would, could not have retained the appearance of lightness and independence. 'You really feel me as a friend, a true friend?'

'If you really think me worth your while, of course. I don't see how you can—an ill-tempered, ignorant, uninteresting woman, whom you've run across in a hotel and been good to.'

'I don't think of you like that, as you know. I think you a strangely lovely and strangely interesting person. From the first moment I saw you you appealed to me. I felt that you needed something—love and sympathy, perhaps. The fact that it's been a sort of chance—our meeting—makes it all the sweeter to me.'

Again Helen was silent for a moment, and again Althea, sitting with downcast eyes, knew that, though touched, she was uncomfortable. 'You are too nice and kind for words,' she then said. 'I can't tell you how kind I think it of you.'

'Then we are friends? You do feel me as a friend who will always be interested and always care?'

'Yes, indeed; and I do so thank you.'

Althea put out her hand, and Helen gave her hers, saying, 'You are a dear,' and adding, as though to take refuge from her own discomposure, 'much too dear for the likes of me.'

The bond was thus sealed, yet Aunt Julia's shaft still stuck. It was she who had felt near, and who had drawn Helen near. Helen, probably, would never have thought of keeping in touch. She was Helen's friend because she had appealed for friendship, and because Helen thought her a dear. The only comfort was to know that Helen's humility was real. She might have offered her friendship could she have realised that it was of value to anybody.

It was a few evenings after this, and perhaps as a result of their talk, that, as they sat in Althea's room over coffee, Helen said: 'Why don't you come to England this summer, Althea?'

Aunt Julia had proposed that Althea should go on to Bayreuth with her and the girls, and Althea was turning over the plan, thinking that perhaps she had had enough of Bayreuth, so that Helen's suggestion, especially as it was made in Aunt Julia's presence, was a welcome one. 'Perhaps I will,' she said. 'Will you be there?'

'I'll be in London, with Aunt Grizel, until the middle of July; after that, in the country till winter. You ought to take a house in the country and let me come to stay with you,' said Helen, smiling.

'Will you pay me a long visit?' Althea smiled back.

'As long as you'll ask me for.'

'Well, you are asked for as long as you will stay. Where shall I get a house? There are some nice ones near Miss Buckston's.'

'Oh, don't let us be too near Miss Buckston,' said Helen, laughing.

'But surely, Althea, you won't give up Bayreuth,' Aunt Julia interposed. 'It is going to be specially fine this year. And then you know so few people in England, you will be very lonely. Nothing is more lonely than the English country when you know nobody.'

'Helen is a host in herself,' said Althea; and though Helen did not realise the full force of the compliment, it was more than satisfactory to have her acquiesce with: 'Oh, as to people, I can bring you heaps of them, if you want them.'

'It is a lovely idea,' said Althea; 'and if I must miss Bayreuth, Aunt Julia, I needn't miss you and the girls. You will have to come and stay with me. Do you know of a nice house, Helen, in pretty country, and not too near Miss Buckston?' It was rather a shame of her, she felt, this proviso, but indeed she had never found Miss Buckston endearing, and since knowing Helen she had seen more clearly than before that she was in many ways oppressive.

Helen was reflecting. 'I do know of a house,' she said, 'in a very nice country, too. You might have a look at it. It's where I used to go, as a girl, you know, and stay with my cousins, the Digbys.'

'That would be perfect, Helen.'

'Oh, I don't know that you would find it perfect. It is a plain stone house, with a big, dilapidated garden, nice trees and lawns, miles from everything, and with old-fashioned, shabby furniture. Since Gerald came into the place, he's not been able to keep it up, and he has to let it. He hasn't been able to let it for the last year or so, and would be glad of the chance. If you like the place you'll only have to say the word.'

'I know I shall like it. Don't you like it?'

'Oh, I love it; but that's a different matter. It is more of a home to me than any place in the world.'

'I consider it settled. I don't need to see it.'

'No; it certainly isn't settled,' Helen replied, with her pleasant decisiveness. 'You certainly shan't take it till you see it. I will write to Gerald and tell him that no one else is to have it until you do.'

'I am quite determined to have that house,' said Althea. 'A place that you love must be lovely. Write if you like. But the matter is settled in my mind.'

'Don't be foolish, my dear,' said Aunt Julia. 'Miss Buchanan is quite right. You mustn't think of taking a house until you see it. How do you know that the drainage is in order, or even that the beds are comfortable. Miss Buchanan says that it is miles away from everything, too. You may find the situation very dismal and unsympathetic.'

'It's pretty country, I think,' said Helen, 'and I'm sure the drainage and the beds are all right. But Althea must certainly see it first.'

It was settled, however, quite settled in Althea's mind that she was to take Merriston House. She bade Helen farewell three days later, and they had arranged that they were, within a fortnight, to meet in London, and go together to look at it.

And Althea wrote to Franklin Winslow Kane, and informed him of her new plans, and that he must be her guest at Merriston House for as long as his own plans allowed him. Her mood in regard to Franklin had greatly altered since that evening of gloom a fortnight ago. Franklin, then, had seemed the only fact worth looking at; but now she seemed embarked on a voyage of discovery, where bright new planets swam above the horizon with every forward rock of her boat. Franklin was by no means dismissed; Franklin could never be dismissed; but he was relegated; and though, as far as her fondness went, he would always be firmly placed, she could hardly place him clearly in the new and significantly peopled environment that her new friendship opened to her.

CHAPTER VI.

Helen Buchanan was a person greatly in demand, and, in her migratory existence, her pauses at her Aunt Grizel's little house near Eaton Square were, though frequent, seldom long. When she did come, her bedroom and her sitting-room were always waiting for her, as was Aunt Grizel with her cheerful 'Well, my dear, glad to see you back again.' Their mutual respect and trust were deep; their affection, too, though it was seldom expressed. She knew Aunt Grizel to the ground, and Aunt Grizel knew her to the ground—almost; and they were always pleased to be together.

Helen's sitting-room, where she could see any one she liked and at any time she liked, was behind the dining-room on the ground floor, and from its window one saw a small neat garden with a plot of grass, bordering flower-beds, a row of little fruit-trees, black-branched but brightly foliaged, and high walls that looked as though they were built out of sooty plum cake. Aunt Grizel's cat, Pharaoh, sleek, black, and stalwart, often lay on the grass plot in the sunlight; he was lying there now, languidly turned upon his side, with outstretched feet and drowsily blinking eyes, when Helen and her cousin, Gerald Digby, talked together on the day after her return from Paris.

Gerald Digby stood before the fireplace looking with satisfaction at his companion. He enjoyed looking at Helen, for he admired her more than any woman he knew. It was always a pleasure to see her again; and, like Aunt Grizel, he trusted and respected her deeply, though again, like Aunt Grizel, he did not, perhaps, know her quite down to the ground. He thought, however, that he did; he knew that Helen was as intimate with nobody in the world as with him, not even with Aunt Grizel, and it was one of his most delightful experiences to saunter through all the chambers of Helen's mind, convinced that every door was open to him.

Gerald Digby was a tall and very slender man; he tilted forward when he walked, and often carried his hands in his pockets. He had thick, mouse-coloured hair, which in perplexed or meditative moments he often ruffled by rubbing his hand through it, and even when thus disordered it kept its air of fashionable grace. His large, long nose, his finely curved lips and eyelids, had a delicately carved look, as though the sculptor had taken great care over the details of his face. His brown eyes had thick, upturned lashes, and were often in expression absent and irresponsible, but when he looked at any one, intent and merry, like a gay dog's eyes. And of the many charming things about Gerald Digby the most charming was his smile, which was as infectious as a child's, and exposed a joyous array of large white teeth.

He was smiling at his cousin now, for she was telling him, dryly, yet with a mocking humour all her own, of her Paris fiasco that had delayed her return to London by a fortnight, and, by the expense it had entailed upon her, had deprived her of the new hat and dress that she had hoped in Paris to secure. Talking of Paris led to the letter she had sent him four or five days ago. 'About this rich American,' said Gerald; 'is she really going to take Merriston, do you think? It's awfully good of you, Helen, to try and get a tenant for me.'

'I don't know that you'd call her rich—not as Americans go; but I believe she will take Merriston. She wanted to take it at once, on faith; but I insisted that she must see it first.'

'You must have cried up the dear old place for her to be so eager.'

'I think she is eager about pleasing me,' said Helen. 'I told her that I loved the place and hadn't been there for years, and that moved her very much. She has taken a great fancy to me.'

'Really,' said Gerald. 'Why?'

'I'm sure I don't know. She is a dear little person, but rather funny.'

'Of course, there is no reason why any one shouldn't take a fancy to you,' said Gerald, smiling; 'only—to that extent—in so short a time.'

'I appealed to her pity, I think; she came in and took care of me, and was really unspeakably kind. And she seemed to get tremendously interested in me. But then, she seemed capable of getting tremendously interested in lots of things. I've noticed that Americans often take things very seriously.'

'And you became great pals?'

'Yes, I suppose we did.'

'She interested you?'

Helen smiled a little perplexedly, and lit a cigarette before answering. 'Well, no; I can't say that she did that; but that, probably, was my own fault.'

'Why didn't she interest you?' Gerald went on, taking a cigarette from the case she offered. He was fond of such desultory pursuit of a subject; he and Helen spent hours in idle exchanges of impression.

Helen's answer was hardly illuminating: 'She wasn't interesting.'

'It was rather interesting of her to take such an interest in you,' said Gerald subtly.

'No.' Helen warmed to the theme. It had indeed perplexed her, and she was glad to unravel her impressions to this understanding listener. 'No, that's just what it wasn't; it might have been if one hadn't felt her a person so easily affected. She had—how can I put it?—it seems brutal when she is such a dear—but she had so little stuff in her; it was as if she had to find it all the time in other things and people. She is like a glass of water that would like to be wine, and she has no wine in her; it could only be poured in, and there's not room for much. At best she can only be eau rougie.'

Gerald laughed. 'How you see things, and say them! Poor Miss Jakes!—that's her name, isn't it? She sounds tame.'

'She is tame.'

'Is she young, pretty?'

'Not young, about my age; not pretty, but it's a nice face; wistful, with large, quite lovely eyes. She knows a lot about everything, and has been everywhere, and has kept all her illusions intact—a queer mixture of information and innocence. It's difficult to keep one's mind on what she's saying; there is never any background to it. She wants something, but she doesn't know whether it's what other people want or whether it's what she wants, so that she can't want anything very definitely.'

Gerald still laughed. 'How you must have been taking her in!'

'I suppose I must have been, though I didn't know it. But I did like her, you know. I liked her very much. A glass of water is a nice thing sometimes.'

'Nicer than eau rougie; I'm afraid she's eau rougie.'

'Eau rougie may be nice, too, if one is tired and thirsty and needs mild refreshment, not altogether tasteless, and not at all intoxicating. She was certainly that to me. I was very much touched by her kindness.'

'I shall be touched if she'll take Merriston. I'm fearfully hard up. I suppose it would only be a little let; but that would be better than nothing.'

'She might stay for the winter if she liked it. I shan't try to make her like it, but I'll do my best to make her stay on if she does, and with a clear conscience, for I think that her staying will depend on her seeing me.'

'Wouldn't that mean that she'd be a great deal on your hands?'

'I shouldn't mind that; we get on very well. She will be here next week, you know. You must come to tea and meet her.'

'Well, I don't know. I don't think that I'm particularly eager to meet her,' Gerald confessed jocosely.

'You'll have to meet her a good deal if you are to see much of me,' said Helen; on which he owned that, with that compulsion put upon him, he and Miss Jakes might become intimates.

Gerald Digby was a young man who did very little work. He had been vaguely intended, by an affectionate but haphazard family, for the diplomatic service, but it was found, after he had done himself some credit at Eton and Oxford, that the family resources didn't admit of this obviously suitable career for him; and an aged and wealthy uncle, who had been looked to confidently for succour, married at the moment, most unfeelingly, so that Gerald's career had to be definitely abandoned. Another relation found him a berth in the City, where he might hope to amass quite a fortune; but Gerald soon said that he far preferred poverty. He thought that he would like to paint and be an artist; he had a joyful eye for delicate, minute forms of beauty, and was most happily occupied when absorbed in Japanese-like studies of transient loveliness—a bird in flight, a verdant grasshopper on a wheat-blade, the tangled festoons of a wild convolvulus spray. His talent, however, though genuine, could hardly supply him with a livelihood, and he would have been seriously put to it had not his father's death left him a tiny income, while a half-informal secretaryship to a political friend, offered him propitiously at the same time, gave him leisure for his painting as well as for a good many other pleasant things. He had leisure, in especial, for going from country-house to country-house, where he was immensely in demand, and where he hunted, danced, and acted in private theatricals—usually in company with his cousin Helen. Helen's position in life was very much like his own, but that she hadn't even an informal secretaryship to depend upon. He had known Helen all his life, and she was almost like a sister, only nicer; for he associated sisters with his own brood, who were lean, hunting ladies, pleasant, but monotonous and inarticulate. Helen was very articulate and very various. He loved to look at her, as he loved to look at birds and flowers, and he loved to talk with her. He had many opportunities to look and talk. They stayed at the same houses in the country, and in London, when she was with old Miss Buchanan, he usually saw her every day. If he didn't drop in for a moment on his way to work at ten-thirty in the morning, he dropped in to tea; and if his or Helen's day were too full to admit of this, he managed to come in for a goodnight chat after a dinner or before a dance. He enjoyed Helen's talk and Helen's appearance most of all, he thought, at these late hours, when, a little weary and jaded, in evening dress and cloak, she lit her invariable cigarette, and mused with him over the events and people of the day. He liked Helen's way of talking about people; they knew an interminable array of them, many involved in enlivening complications, yet Helen never gossiped; the musing impersonality and impartiality with which she commented and surmised lifted her themes to a realm almost of art; she was pungent, yet never malicious, and the tolerant lucidity of her insight was almost benign.

Her narrow face, leaning back in its dark aureole of hair, her strange eyes and bitter-sweet lips—all dimmed, as it were, by drowsiness and smoke, and yet never more intelligently awake than at these nocturnal hours—remained with him as most typical of Helen's most significant and charming self. It was her aspect of mystery and that faint hint of bitterness that he found so charming; Helen herself he never thought of as mysterious. Mystery was a mere outward asset of her beauty, like the powdery surface of a moth's wing. He didn't think of Helen as mysterious, perhaps because he thought little about her at all; he only looked and listened while she made him think about everything but herself, and he felt always happy and altogether at ease in her presence. There seemed, indeed, no reason for thinking about a person whom one had known all one's life long.

And Helen was more than the best of company and the loveliest of objects; she was at once comrade and counsellor. He depended upon her more than upon any one. Comically helpless as he often found himself, he asked her advice about everything, and always received the wisest.

He had had often, though not so much in late years, to ask her advice about girls, for in spite of his financial ineligibility he was so engaging a person that he found himself continually drawn to the verge of decisive flirtations. His was rarely the initiative; he was responsive and affectionate and not at all susceptible, and Helen, who knew girls of her world to the bone, could accurately gauge the effect upon him of the pleading coquetry at which they were such adepts. She could gauge them the better, no doubt, from having herself no trace of coquetry. Men often liked her, but often found her cold and cynical, and even suspected her of conceit, especially since it was known that she had refused many excellent opportunities for establishing herself in life. She was also suspected by many of abysmal cleverness, and this reputation frightened admiring but uncomplicated young men more than anything else. Now, when her first youth was past, men more seldom fell in love with her and more frequently liked her; they had had time to find out that if she were cold she was also very kind, and that if abysmally clever, she could adapt her cleverness to pleasant, trivial uses.

Gerald, when he thought at all about her, thought of Helen as indeed cold, clever, and cynical; but these qualities never oppressed him, aware from the first, as he had been, of the others, and he found in them, moreover, veritable shields and bucklers for himself. It was to some one deeply experienced, yet quite unwarped by personal emotions, that he brought his recitals of distress and uncertainty. Lady Molly was a perfect little dear, but could he go on with it? How could he if he would? She hadn't any money, and her people would be furious; she herself, he felt sure, would be miserable in no time, if they did marry. They wouldn't even have enough—would they, did Helen think?—for love in a cottage, and Molly would hate love in a cottage. They would have to go about living on their relations and friends, as he now did, more or less; but with a wife and babies, how could one? Did Helen think one could? Gerald would finish dismally, standing before her with his hands thrust deeply into his pockets and a ruffled brow of inquiry. Or else it was the pretty Miss Oliver who had him—half alarmed, half enchanted—in her toils, and Gerald couldn't imagine what she was going to do with him. For such entanglements Helen's advice had always shown a way out, and for his uncertainties—though she never took the responsibility of actual guidance—her reflective questionings, her mere reflective silences, were illuminating. They made clear for him, as for her, that recklessness could only be worth while if one were really—off one's own bat, as it were—'in love'; and that, this lacking, recklessness was folly sure to end in disaster. 'Wait, either until you care so much that you must, or else until you meet some one so nice, so rich, and so suitable that you may,' said Helen. 'If you are not careful you will find yourself married to some one who will bore you and quarrel with you on twopence a year.'

'You must be careful for me,' said Gerald. 'Please warn and protect.'

And Helen replied that she would always do her best for him.

It had never occurred to Gerald to turn the tables on Helen and tell her that she ought to marry. His imagination was not occupied with Helen's state, though once, after a conversation with old Miss Buchanan, he remarked to Helen, looking at her with a vague curiosity, that it was a pity she hadn't taken Lord Henry or Mr. Fergusson. 'Miss Buchanan tells me you might have been one of the first hostesses in London if you hadn't thrown away your chances.'

'I'm all right,' said Helen.

'Yes, you yourself are; but after she dies?'

Helen owned, with a smile, that she could certainly do with some few thousands a year; but that, in default of them, she could manage to scrape along.

'But you've never had any better chances, have you?' said Gerald rather tentatively. He might confide everything in Helen, but he realised, as a restraining influence, that she never made any confidences, even to him, who, he was convinced, knew her down to the ground.

Helen owned that she hadn't.

'Your aunt thinks it a dreadful pity. She's very much worried about you.'

'It's late in the day for the poor dear to worry. The chances were over long ago.'

'You didn't care enough?'

'I was young and foolish enough to want to be in love when I married,' said Helen, smiling at him with her half-closed eyes.

And Gerald said that, yes, he would have expected that from her; and with this dismissed the subject from his mind, taking it for granted that Helen's disengaged, sustaining, and enlivening spinsterhood would always be there for his solace and amusement.

CHAPTER VII.

Helen was on one side of her and Mr. Digby sat in an opposite corner of the railway carriage, and they were approaching the end of the journey to Merriston House on a bright July day soon after Althea's arrival in England. She had met Mr. Digby at Helen's the day before and had suggested that he should come with them. Gerald had remarked that it might be tiresome if she hated Merriston, and he were there to see that she hated it; but Althea was so sure of liking it that her conviction imposed itself.

Mr. Digby and Helen were both smoking; they had asked her very solicitously whether she minded, and she had said she didn't, although in fact she did not like the smell of tobacco, and Helen's constant cigarette distressed her quite unselfishly on the score of health. The windows were wide open, and though the gale that blew through ruffled her smooth hair and made her veil tickle disagreeably, these minor discomforts could not spoil her predominant sense of excitement and adventure. Mr. Digby's presence, particularly, roused it. He was so long, so limp, so graceful, lounging there in his corner. His socks and his tie were of such a charming shade of blue and his hair such a charming shade of light mouse-colour. He was vague and blithe, immersed in his own thoughts, which, apparently, were pleasant and superficial. When his eyes met Althea's, he smiled at her, and she thought his smile the most engaging she had ever seen. For the rest, he hardly spoke at all, and did not seem to consider it incumbent on him to make any conversational efforts, yet his mere presence lent festivity to the occasion.

Helen did not talk much either; she smoked her cigarette and looked out of the window with half-closed eyes. Her slender feet, encased in grey shoes, were propped on the opposite seat; her grey travelling-dress hung in smoke-like folds about her; in her little hat was a bright green wing.

Althea wondered if Mr. Digby appreciated his cousin's appearance, or if long brotherly familiarity had dimmed his perception of it. She wondered how her own appearance struck him. She knew that she was very trim and very elegant, and in mere beauty—quite apart from charm, which she didn't claim—she surely excelled Helen; Helen with her narrow eyes, odd projecting nose, and small, sulkily-moulded lips. Deeply though she felt the fascination of her friend's strange visage, she could but believe her own the lovelier. So many people—not only Franklin Winslow Kane—had thought her lovely. There was no disloyalty in recognising the fact for oneself, and an innocent satisfaction in the hope that Mr. Digby might recognise it too.

The day that flashed by on either side had also a festive quality: blue skies heaped with snowy clouds; fields brimmed with breeze-swept grain, green and silver, or streaked with the gold of butter-cups; swift streams and the curves of summer foliage. It was a country remote, wooded and pastoral, and Althea, a connoisseur in landscapes, was enchanted.

'Do you like it?' Helen asked her as they passed along the edge of a little wood, glimpses of bright meadow among its clearings. 'We are almost there now, and it's like this all about Merriston.'

'I've hardly seen any part of England I like so much,' said Althea. 'It has a sweet, untouched wildness rather rare in England.'

'I always think that it's a country to love and live in,' said Helen. 'Some countries seem made only to be looked at.'

Althea wondered, as she then went on looking at this country, whether she were thinking of her girlhood and of her many journeys to Merriston. She wondered if Mr. Digby were thinking of his boyhood. Ever since seeing those two together yesterday afternoon she had wondered about them. She had never encountered a relationship quite like theirs; it was so close, so confident, yet so untender. She could hardly make out that they liked each other; all that one saw was that they trusted, so that it had something of the businesslike quality of a partnership. Yet she found herself building up an absurd little romance about their past. It might be, who knew, that Mr. Digby had once been in love with Helen and that she had refused him; he was poor, and she had said that she must marry money. Althea's heart tightened a little with compassion for Mr. Digby. Only, if this ever had been, it was well over now; and more narrowly observing Mr. Digby's charming and irresponsible face, she reflected that he was hardly the sort of person to illustrate large themes of passion and fidelity.

A fly was waiting for them at the station, and as they jolted away Gerald remarked that she was now to see one of the worst features of Merriston; it was over an hour from the station, and if one hadn't a motor the drive was a great bore. Althea, however, didn't find it a bore. Her companions talked now, their heads at the windows; it had been years since they had traversed that country together; every inch of it was known to them and significant of weary waits, wonderful runs, feats and misadventures at gates and ditches; for their reminiscences were mainly sportsmanlike. Althea listened, absorbed, but distressed. It was Gerald who caught and interpreted the expression of her large, gentle eyes.

'I don't believe you like fox-hunting, Miss Jakes,' he said.

'No, indeed, I do not,' said Althea, shaking her head.

'You mean you think it cruel?'

'Very cruel.'

'Yet where would we be without it?' said Gerald. 'And where would the foxes be? After all, while they live, their lives are particularly pleasant.'

'With possible intervals of torture? Don't you think that, if they could choose, they would rather not live at all?'

'Oh, a canny old fox doesn't mind the run so much, you know—enjoys it after a fashion, no doubt.'

'Don't salve your conscience by that sophism, Gerald; the fox is canny because he has been terrified so often,' said Helen. 'Let us own that it is barbarous, but such glorious sport that one tries to forget the fox.'

It required some effort for Althea to testify against her and Mr. Digby, but she felt so strongly on the subject of animals, foxes in particular, that her courage did not fail her. 'I think it is when we forget, that the dreadful things in life, the sins and cruelties, happen,' she said.

Gerald's gay eyes were cogitatingly fixed on her, and Helen continued to look out of the window; but she thought that they both liked her the better for her frankness, and she felt in the little ensuing silence that it had brought them nearer—bright, alien creatures that they were.

Her first view of Merriston House hardly confirmed her hopes of it, though she would not have owned to herself that this was so. It was neither so beautiful nor so imposing as she had expected; it was even, perhaps, rather commonplace; but in a moment she was able to overcome this slight disloyalty and to love it the more for its unpretentiousness. A short, winding avenue of limes led to it, and it stood high among lawns that fell away to lower shrubberies and woods. It was a square stone house, covered with creepers, a white rose clustering over the doorway and a group of trees over-topping its chimneys.

Inside, where the housekeeper welcomed them and tea waited for them, was the same homely brightness. Hunting prints hung in the hall; rows of mediocre, though pleasing, family portraits in the dining-room. The long drawing-room at the back of the house, overlooking the lawns and a far prospect, was a much inhabited room, cheerful and shabby. There were old-fashioned water-colour landscapes, porcelain in cabinets and on shelves, and many tables crowded with ivory and silver bric-à-brac; things from India and things from China, that Digbys in the Army and Digbys in the Navy had brought home.

'What a Philistine room it is,' said Gerald, smiling as he looked around him; 'but I must say I like it just as it is. It has never made an æsthetic effort.'

Gerald's smile irradiated the whole house for Althea, and lit up, in especial, the big, sunny school-room where he and Helen found most memories of all. 'The same old table, Helen,' he said, 'and other children have spilled ink on it and scratched their initials just as we used to; here are yours and mine. Do you remember the day we did them under Fräulein's very nose? And here are all our old books, too. Look, Helen, the Roman history with your wicked drawings on the fly-leaves: Tullia driving over her poor old father, and Cornelia—ironic little wretch you were even then—what a prig she is with her jewels! And what splendid butter-scotch you used to make over the fire on winter evenings.'

Helen remembered everything, smiling as she followed Gerald about the room and looked at ruthless Tullia; and Althea, watching them, was touched—for them, and then, with a little counter-stroke of memory, for herself. She remembered her old home too—the dignified old house in steep Chestnut Street, and the little house on the blue Massachusetts coast where she had often passed long days playing by herself, for she had been an only child. She loved it here, for it was like a home, peaceful and sheltering; but where in all the world had she really a home? Where in all the world did she belong? The thought brought tears to her eyes as she looked out of the schoolroom window and listened to Gerald and Helen. It had ended, of course, for of course it had really begun, in Althea's decision to take Merriston House. It was quite fixed now, and on the way back she had made her new friends promise to be often together with her in the home of their youth. She had made them promise this so prettily and with such gentle warmth that it was very natural that Gerald, in talking over the event with Helen that evening, should say, strolling round Helen's little sitting-room, 'She's rather a dear, that little friend of yours.'

Helen was tired and lay extended on the divan in the grey dress she had not had time to change. She had doffed her hat and, thrusting its hatpins through it, had laid it on her knees, so that, as Gerald had remarked, she looked rather like Brünhilde on her rocky couch. But, unlike Brünhilde, her hands were clasped behind her neck, and she looked up at the ceiling. 'A perfect little dear,' she assented.

'Did you notice her eyes when she was talking about the foxes? They were as sorrowful and piteous as a Mater Dolorosa's. She is definite enough about some things, isn't she? Things like right and wrong, I mean, as she sees them.'

'Yes; she is clear about outside things, like right and wrong.'

'It's a good deal to be clear about, isn't it?'

'I suppose so,' Helen reflected. 'I don't feel that I really understand Althea. People who aren't clear about themselves are difficult to understand, I think.'

'It's that that really gives them a mystery. I feel that she really is a little mysterious,' said Gerald. 'One wonders what she would do in certain cases, and feel in certain situations, and one can't remotely imagine. She is a sealed book.'

'She wonders,' said Helen.

'And you suspect that her pages are empty?'

Helen reflected, but nothing seemed to come. She closed her eyes, smiling, and said, 'Be off, please. I'm getting too sleepy to have suspicions. We have plenty of time to find out whether anything is written on Althea's pages.'

CHAPTER VIII.

But, when Gerald was gone, Helen found that she was no longer sleepy. She lay, her eyes closed, straight and still, like an effigy on a tomb, and she thought, intently and quietly. It was more a series of pictures than a linking of ideas with which her mind was occupied—pictures of her childhood and girlhood in Scotland and at Merriston House. It was dispassionately that she watched the little figure, lonely, violent, walking over the moors, hiding in the thickets of the garden, choking with tears of fury, clenching teeth over fierce resentments. She almost smiled at the sight of her. What constant resentments, what frequent furies! They centred, of course, about the figure of her mother, lovely, vindictive, and stony-hearted, as she had been and was. Helen's life had dawned in the consciousness of love for this beautiful mother, whom she had worshipped with the ardent humility of a little dog. Afterwards, with a vehemence as great, she had grown to hate her. All her girlhood had been filled with struggles against her mother. Sometimes for weeks they had not spoken to each other, epochs during which, completely indifferent though she was, Mrs. Buchanan had given herself the satisfaction of smartly boxing her daughter's ears when her mute, hostile presence too much exasperated her. There had been no refuge for Helen with her father, a gloomy man, immersed in sport and study, nor in her brother Nigel, gay and pleasant though he was. When once Nigel got away to school and college, he spent as little time at home as possible. Helen was as solitary as a sea-bird, blown far inland and snared. Then came the visits to Merriston House—the cheerful, chattering houseful of happy girls, the kind father and mother, and Gerald. Gerald! From the time that he came into her life all the pictures were full of him, so full that she hardly saw herself any longer; she was only some one who watched and felt.

Her violent nature, undisciplined except by its own pride, did not submit easily to the taming processes of a wholesome family life; she dominated the girl cousins, and they only counted as chorus in the drama of her youth. It was Gerald who counted, at once, counted for everything else. She cared so much for him that, feeling her independence slipping from her, she at first quarrelled with him constantly, as far as he would let her quarrel with him. Her brooding bitterness amazed and amused him. While she stormed, he would laugh at her, gaily and ironically, and tell her that she was an absurd little savage. And, after she had burst into a frenzy of tears and fled from him, he would seek her out, find her hidden in some corner of the garden or shrubberies, and, grieved and alarmed, put his arms around her, kiss her and say: 'Look here, I'm awfully sorry. I can't bear to have you take things like this. Please make up.'

He could not bear to see her suffering, ludicrous though he thought her suffering to be. And it was this sweetness, this comprehension and tenderness, like sunlight flooding her gloomy and petrified young heart, that filled Helen with astonished bliss. She was tamed at last to the extent of laughing with Gerald at herself; and, though the force of her nature led him, the sweetness of his nature controlled her. They became the dearest of friends.

Yes, so it had always been; so it had always looked—to all the rest of the world, and to Gerald. Helen, lying on her divan, saw the pictures of comradeship filling the years. It was her consciousness of what the real meaning of the pictures was that supplied something else, something hidden and desperate that pulsed in them all. How she remembered the first time that she had drawn away when Gerald kissed her, putting up between them the shield of a lightly yet decisively accepted conventionality. They were 'growing up'; this was her justification. How she remembered what it had cost her to keep up the lightness of her smile so that he should not guess what lay beneath. Her nature was all passion, and enclosing this passion, like a steady hand held round a flame, was a fierce purity, a fierce pride. Gerald had never guessed. No one had ever guessed. It seemed to Helen that the pain of it had broken her heart in the very spring of her years; that it was only a maimed and cautious creature that the world had ever known.

She lay, and drew long quiet breaths in looking at it all. The day of reawakened memories had been like a sword in her heart, and now she seemed to draw it out slowly, and let the blood come with a sense of peace. She could even, as often, lend to the contemplation of her tragedy the bitter little grimace of mockery with which she met so much of life. She could tell herself, as often, that she had never outgrown love-sick girlhood, and that she was merely in love with Gerald's smile. Yet Gerald was all in his smile; and Gerald, it seemed, was made to be loved, all of him, helplessly and hopelessly, by unfortunate her. She felt her love as a misfortune; it was too strong and too unsatisfied to be felt in any sense as joy, though it strung her nature to a painful appreciation of joy. She saw life with a cold, appraising eye; it was like a landscape robbed of all sunlight, and, so robbed, so bleak, and so bereft, it was easy to appraise it, to see, since one could have no warmth or light, what were the next best things to have. She had missed the next best things again and again, when the moment had come for taking them; she had drawn back sick, blanched, shaken with the throes of desperate hope. Only in these last years, when next best things were no longer so plentiful, had hope really died. Her heart still beat, but it seemed to beat thinly, among all the heaped-up ashes of dead hopes. She was free to go forth into the sunless world and choose what place should be hers. She did not care much for anything that world had to give her. But she intended to choose carefully and calmly. She was aware in herself of firm, well-knit faculty, of tastes, sharp and sensitive, demanding only an opportunity to express themselves in significant and finished forms of life; and though Helen did not think of it in these terms, saying merely to herself that she wanted money and power, the background of her intention was a consciousness of capacity for power. Reflecting on this power, and on the paths to its realisation, she was led far, indeed, from any thought of Althea; and Althea was not at all in her mind as, sleepy at last, and very weary, she remembered Gerald's last words. It was the thought of Gerald that brought the thought of Althea, and of Althea's pages. Fair and empty they were, she felt sure, adorned only here and there with careful and becoming maxims. She smiled a little, not untenderly, as she thought of Althea. But, just before sinking to deeper drowsiness, and deciding that she must rouse herself and go upstairs to bed, a further consciousness came to her. The sunny day at Merriston had not, in her thoughts, brought them near to one another—Gerald, and Althea, and her; yet something significant ran through her sudden memory of it. She had moments of her race's sense of second-sight, and it never came without making her aware of a pause—a strange, forced pause—where she had to look at something, touch something, in the dark, as it were. It was there as she roused herself from her half-somnolent state; it was there in the consciousness of a turning-point in her life—in Gerald's, in Althea's. 'We may write something on Althea's pages,' was the thought with which, smiling over its inappropriateness, she went upstairs. And the fancy faded from her memory, as if it had been a bird's wing that brushed her cheek in the darkness.

CHAPTER IX.

Althea went down to Merriston House in the middle of July. Helen accompanied her to see her safely installed and to set the very torpid social ball rolling. There were not many neighbours, but Helen assembled them all. She herself could stay only a few days. She was bound, until the middle of August, in a rush of engagements, and meanwhile Althea, rather ruefully, was forced to fall back on Miss Buckston for companionship. She had always, till now, found Miss Buckston's cheerful dogmatism fortifying, and, even when it irritated her, instructive; but she had now new standards of interest, and new sources of refreshment, and, shut up with Miss Buckston for a rainy week, she felt as never before the defects of this excellent person's many qualities.

She had fires lighted, much to Miss Buckston's amusement, and sat a good deal by the blaze in the drawing-room, controlling her displeasure when Miss Buckston, dressed in muddy tweed and with a tweed cap pulled down over her brows, came striding in from a ten-mile tramp and said, pulling open all the windows, 'You are frightfully frusty in here.'

It was not 'frusty.' Althea had a scientific regard for ventilation, and a damp breeze from the garden blew in at the furthest window. She had quite enough air.

Miss Buckston was also very critical of Merriston House, and pointed out the shabbiness of the chintz and faded carpets. The garden, she said, was shamefully neglected, and she could not conceive how people could bear to let a decent place like this go to ruin. 'But he's a slack creature, Gerald Digby, I've heard.'

Althea coldly explained that Mr. Digby was too poor to live at Merriston and to keep it up. She did not herself in the least mind the shabbiness.

'Oh, I don't mind it,' said Miss Buckston. 'I only think he's done himself very well in getting you to take the place in this condition. How much do you give for it?'

Althea, more coldly, named the sum. It was moderate; Miss Buckston had to grant that, though but half-satisfied that there was no intention to 'do' her friend. 'When once you get into the hands of hard-up fashionable folk,' she said, 'it's as well to look sharp.'

Althea did not quite know what to say to this. She had never in the past opposed Miss Buckston, and it would be difficult to tell her now that she took too much upon herself. At a hint of hesitancy, she knew, Miss Buckston would pass to and fro over her like a steam-roller, nearly as noisy, and to her own mind as composedly efficient. Hesitancy or contradiction she flattened and left behind her.

She had an air of owning Bach that became peculiarly vexatious to Althea, who, in silence, but armed with new standards, was assembling her own forces and observed, in casting an eye over them, that she had heard five times as much music as Miss Buckston and might be granted the right of an opinion on it. She took satisfaction in a memory of Miss Buckston's face singing in the Bach choir—even at the time it had struck her as funny—at a concert to which Althea had gone with her some years ago in London. It was to see, for her own private delectation, a weak point in Miss Buckston's iron-clad personality to remember how very funny she could look. Among the serried ranks of singing heads hers had stood out with its rubicund energy, its air of mastery, the shining of its eye-glasses and of its large white teeth; and while she sang Miss Buckston had jerked her head rhythmically to one side and beaten time with her hand as if to encourage and direct her less competent companions. Sometimes, now, she looked almost as funny, when she sat down to the piano and gave forth a recitative.

After Bach, Woman's Suffrage was Miss Buckston's special theme, and, suspecting a new hint of uncertainty in Althea, whose conviction she had always taken for granted, she attacked her frequently and mercilessly.

'Pooh, my dear,' she would say, 'don't quote your frothy American women to me. Americans have no social conscience. That's the trouble with you all; rank individualists, every one of you. When the political attitude of the average citizen is that of the ostrich keeping his head in the sand so that he shan't see what the country's coming to, what can you expect of the women? Your arguments don't affect the suffrage question, they merely dismiss America. I shall lose my temper if you trot them out to me.' Miss Buckston never lost her temper, however; other people's opinions counted too little with her for that.

At the end of the first week Althea felt distinctly that though the country, even under these dismal climatic conditions, might be delightful if shared with some people, it was not delightful shared with Miss Buckston. She did not like walking in the rain; she was a creature of houses, cabs and carriages. The sober beauty of blotted silhouettes, and misty, rolling hills at evening when the clouds lifted over the sunset, did not appeal to her. She wished that she had stayed in London; she wished that Helen and Mr. Digby were with her; she was even glad that Aunt Julia and the girls were coming.

There was a welcome diversion afforded for her, when Aunt Julia came, by the prompt hostility that declared itself between her and Miss Buckston. Aunt Julia was not a person to allow a steam-roller to pass over her without protest, and Althea felt that she herself had been cowardly when she saw how Aunt Julia resented, for them both, Miss Buckston's methods. Miss Buckston had a manner of saying rude things in sincere unconsciousness that they could offend anybody. She herself did not take offence easily; she was, as she would have said, 'tough.' But Mrs. Pepperell had all the sensitiveness—for herself and for others—of her race, the British race, highly strung with several centuries of transplantation to an electric climate. If she was rude it was never unconsciously so. After her first talk with Miss Buckston, in which the latter, as was her wont, told her a number of unpleasant facts about America and the Americans, Mrs. Pepperell said to her niece, 'What an intolerable woman!'

'She doesn't mean it,' said Althea feebly.

'Perhaps not,' said Aunt Julia; 'but I intend that she shall see what I mean.'

Althea's feeling was of mingled discomfort and satisfaction. Her sympathies were with Aunt Julia, yet she felt a little guilty towards Miss Buckston, for whom her affection was indeed wavering. Inner loyalty having failed she did not wish outer loyalty to be suspected, and in all the combats that took place she kept in the background and only hoped to see Aunt Julia worst Miss Buckston. But the trouble was that Aunt Julia never did worst her. Even when, passing beyond the bounds of what she considered decency, she became nearly as outspoken as Miss Buckston, that lady maintained her air of cheerful yet impatient tolerance. She continued to tell them that the American wife and mother was the most narrow, the most selfish, the most complacent of all wives and mothers; and, indeed, to Miss Buckston's vigorous virginity, all wives and mothers, though sociologically necessary, belonged to a slightly inferior, more rudimentary species. The American variety, she said, were immersed in mere domesticity or social schemes and squabbles. 'Oh, they talked. I never heard so much talk in all my life as when I was over there,' said Miss Buckston; 'but I couldn't see that they got anything done with it. They had debates about health, and yet one could hardly for love or money get a window open in a train; and they had debates on the ethics of citizenship, and yet you are governed by bosses. Voluble and inefficient creatures, I call them.'

Aunt Julia, conscious of her own honourable career, with its achievements in enlightened philanthropy and its background of careful study, heard this with inexpressible ire; but when she was dragged to the execrable taste of a retaliation, and pointed to the British countryside matron, as they saw her at Merriston—a creature, said Aunt Julia, hardly credible in her complacency and narrowness, Miss Buckston rejoined with an unruffled smile: 'Ah, we'll wake them up. They've good stuff in them—good, staying stuff; and they do a lot of useful work in keeping down Radicalism and keeping up the sentiment of our imperial responsibilities and traditions. They are solid, at all events, not hollow.' And to this poor Aunt Julia, whose traditions did not allow her the retort of sheer brutality, could find no answer.

The absurd outcome of the situation was that Althea and Aunt Julia came to look for succour to the girls. The girls were able—astonishingly so, to cope with Miss Buckston. In the first place, they found her inexpressibly funny, and neither Althea nor Aunt Julia quite succeeded at that; and in the second, they rather liked her; they did not argue with her, they did not take her seriously for a moment; they only played buoyantly about her. A few months before, Althea would have been gravely disturbed by their lack of reverence; she saw it now with guilty satisfaction. Miss Buckston, among the nets they spread for her, plunged and floundered like a good-tempered bull—at first with guileless acquiescence in the game, and then with growing bewilderment. They flouted gay cloaks before her dizzy eyes, and planted ribboned darts in her quivering shoulders. Even Althea could not accuse them of aggressiveness or rudeness. They never put themselves forward; they were there already. They never twisted the tail of the British lion; they never squeezed the eagle; they were far too secure under his wings for that. The bird, indeed, had grown since Althea's youth, and could no longer be carried about as a hostile trophy. They took it for granted, gaily and kindly, that America was 'God's country,' and that all others were schools or playgrounds for her children. They were filled with a confident faith in her future and in their own part in making that future better. And something in the faith was infectious. Even Miss Buckston felt it. Miss Buckston felt it, indeed, more than Althea, whose attitude towards her own native land had always been one of affectionate apology.

'Nice creatures,' said Miss Buckston, 'undisciplined and mannerless as they are; but that's a failing they share with our younger generation. I see more hope for your country in that type than in anything else you can show me. They are solid, and don't ape anything.'

So by degrees a species of friendship grew up between Miss Buckston and the girls, who said that she was a jolly old thing, and more fun than a goat, especially when she sang Bach. Mildred and Dorothy sang exceptionally well and were highly equipped musicians.

Althea could not have said why it was, but this progress to friendliness between her cousins and Miss Buckston made her feel, as she had felt in the Paris hotel drawing-room over a month ago, jaded and unsuccessful. So did the fact that the vicar's eldest son, a handsome young soldier with a low forehead and a loud laugh, fell in love with Dorothy. That young men should fall in love with them was another of the pleasant things that Mildred and Dorothy took for granted. Their love affairs, frank and rather infantile, were of a very different calibre from the earnest passions that Althea had aroused—passions usually initiated by intellectual sympathy and nourished on introspection and a constant interchange of serious literature.

It was soon evident that Dorothy, though she and Captain Merton became the best of friends, had no intention of accepting him. Mrs. Merton, the vicar's wife, had at first been afraid lest she should, not having then ascertained what Mrs. Pepperell's fortune might be; but after satisfying herself on this point by a direct cross-examination of Althea, she was as much amazed as incensed when her boy told her ruefully that he had been refused three times. Althea was very indignant when she realised that Mrs. Merton, bland and determined in her latest London hat, was trying to find out whether Dorothy was a good enough match for Captain Merton, and it was pleasant to watch Mrs. Merton's subsequent discomfiture. At the same time, she felt that to follow in Mildred and Dorothy's triumphant wake was hardly what she had expected to do at Merriston House.

Other things, too, were discouraging. Helen had hardly written at all. She had sent a postcard from Scotland to say that she would have to put off coming till later in August. She had sent another, in answer to a long letter of Althea's, in which Gerald had been asked to come with her, to say that Gerald was yachting, and that she was sure he would love to come some time in the autumn, if his plans allowed it; and Althea, on reading this, felt certain that if she counted for little with Helen, she counted for nothing with Mr. Digby. Whom did she count with? That was the question that once more assailed her as she saw herself sink into insignificance beside Mildred and Dorothy. If Mildred and Dorothy counted for more than she, where was she to look for response and sympathy? And now, once again, as if in answer to these dismal questionings, came a steamer letter from Franklin Winslow Kane, announcing his immediate arrival. Althea had thought very little about Franklin in these last weeks; her mind had been filled with those foreground figures that now seemed to have become uncertain and vanishing. And it was not so much that Franklin came forward as that there was nothing else to look at; not so much that he counted, as that to count so much, in every way, for him might almost atone for counting with no one else. Physically, mentally, morally, Franklin's appreciations of her were deep; they were implied all through his letter, which was at once sober and eager. He said that he would stay at Merriston House for 'just as long as ever she would let him.' Merely to be near her was to him, separated as he was from her for so much of his life, an unspeakable boon. Franklin rarely dealt in demonstrative speeches, but, in this letter, after a half-shy prelude to his own daring, he went on to say: 'Perhaps, considering how long it's been since I saw you, you'll let me kiss your beautiful hands when we meet.'

Franklin had only once kissed her beautiful hands, years ago, on the occasion of her first touched refusal of him. She had severe scruples as to encouraging, by such graciousness, a person you didn't intend to marry; but she really thought, thrilling a little as she read the sentence, that this time, perhaps, Franklin might. Franklin himself never thrilled her; but the words he wrote renewed in her suddenly a happy self-confidence. Who, after all, was Franklin's superior in insight? Wrapped in the garment of his affection, could she not see with equanimity Helen's vagueness and Gerald's indifference? Why, when one came to look at it from the point of view of the soul, wasn't Franklin their superior in every way? It needed some moral effort to brace herself to the inquiry. She couldn't deny that Franklin hadn't their charm; but charm was a very superficial thing compared to moral beauty.

Althea could not have faced the perturbing fact that charm, to her, counted for more than goodness. She clung to her ethical valuations of life, feeling, instinctively, that only in this category lay her own significance. To abandon the obvious weights and measures was to find herself buffeted and astray in a chaotic and menacing universe. Goodness was her guide, and she could cling to it if the enchanting will-o'-the-wisp did not float into sight to beckon and bewilder her. She indignantly repudiated the conception of a social order founded on charm rather than on solid worth; yet, like other frail mortals, she found herself following what allured her nature rather than what responded to the neatly tabulated theories of her mind. It was her beliefs and her instincts that couldn't be made to tally, and in her refusal to see that they did not tally lay her danger, as now, when with an artificially simplified attitude she waited eagerly for the coming of somebody who would restore to her her own sense of significance.

Franklin Winslow Kane arrived late one afternoon, and Althea arranged that she should greet him alone. Miss Buckston, Aunt Julia, the girls, and Herbert Vaughan had driven over to a neighbouring garden-party, and Althea alleged the arrival of her old friend as a very valid excuse. She walked up and down the drawing-room, dressed in one of her prettiest dresses; the soft warmth and light of the low sun filled the air, and her heart expanded with it. She wondered if—ah, if only!—Franklin would himself be able to thrill her, and her deep expectation almost amounted to a thrill. Expectation culminated in a wave of excitement and emotion as the door opened and her faithful lover stood before her.

Franklin Winslow Kane (he signed himself more expeditiously as Franklin W. Kane) was a small, lean man. He had an air of tension, constant, yet under such perfect control, that it counted as placidity rather than as strain. His face was sallow and clean-shaven, and the features seemed neatly drawn on a flat surface rather than modelled, so discreet and so meagre were the sallies and shadows. His lips were calm and firmly closed, and had always the appearance of smiling; of his eyes one felt the bright, benignant beam rather than the shape or colour. His straight stiff hair was shorn in rather odd and rather ugly lines along his forehead and temples, and of his clothes the kindest thing to say was that they were unobtrusive. Franklin had once said of himself, with comic dispassionateness, that he looked like a cheap cigar, and the comparison was apt. He seemed to have been dried, pressed, and moulded, neatly and expeditiously, by some mechanical process that turned out thousands more just like him. A great many things, during this process, had been done to him, but they were commonplace, though complicated things, and they left him, while curiously finished, curiously undifferentiated. The hurrying streets of any large town in his native land would, one felt, be full of others like him: good-tempered, shrewd, alert, yet with an air of placidity, too, as though it were a world that required effort and vigilance of one, and yet, these conditions fulfilled, would always justify one's expectations. If differences there were in Franklin Kane, they were to be sought for, they did not present themselves; and he himself would have been the last to be conscious of them. He didn't think of himself as differentiated; he didn't desire differentiation.

He advanced now towards his beloved, after a slight hesitation, for the sunlight in which she stood as well as her own radiant appearance seemed to have dazzled him a little. Althea held out her hands, and the tears came into her eyes; it was as if she hadn't known, until then, how lonely she was. 'O Franklin, I'm so glad to see you,' she said.

He held her hands, gazing at her with a gentle yet intent rapture, and he forgot, in a daring greater than any he had ever known, to kiss them. Franklin never took anything for granted, and Althea knew that it was because he saw her tears and saw her emotion that he could ask her now, hesitatingly, yet with sudden confidence: 'Althea, it's been so long—you are so lovely—it will mean nothing to you, I know; so may I kiss you?'

Put like that, why shouldn't he? Conscience had not a qualm, and Franklin had never seemed so dear to her. She smiled a sisterly benison upon his request, and, still holding her hands, he leaned to her and kissed her. Closing her eyes she wondered intently for a moment, able, in the midst of her motion, to analyse it; for, yes, it had thrilled her. She needed to be kissed, were it only Franklin who kissed her.

They went, hand in hand, to a sofa, and there she was able to show him only the sisterly benignity that he knew so well. She questioned him sweetly about his voyage, his health, his relatives—his only near relative was a sister who taught in a college—and about their mutual friends and his work. To all he replied carefully and calmly, though looking at her delightedly while he spoke. He had a very deliberate, even way of speaking, and in certain words so broadened the a's that, almost doubled in length by this treatment, they sounded like little bleats. His 'yes' was on two notes and became a dissyllable.

After he had answered all her questions he took up the thread himself. He had tactfully relinquished her hand at a certain moment in her talk. Althea well remembered his sensitiveness to any slightest mood in herself; he was wonderfully imaginative when it came to any human relation. He did not wait for her to feel consciously that it was not quite fitting that her hand should be held for so long.

'This is a nice old place you've got, Althea,' he said, looking about. 'Homelike and welcoming. I liked the look of it as I drove up. Have you a lot of English people with you?'

'Only one; Miss Buckston, you know. Aunt Julia and the girls are here, and Herbert Vaughan, their friend. You know Herbert Vaughan; such a nice young creature; his mother is a Bostonian.'

'I know about him; I don't know him,' said Franklin, who indeed, as she reflected, would not be likely to have met the fashionable Herbert. 'And where is that attractive new friend of yours you wrote to me about—the one you took care of in Paris—the Scotch lady?'

'Helen Buchanan? She is coming; she is in Scotland now.'

'Oh, she's coming. I am to see her, I hope.'

'You are to see everybody, dear Franklin,' said Althea, smiling upon him. 'You are to stay, you know, for as long as you will.'

'That's sweet of you, Althea.' He looked at her. Her kindness still buoyed him above his wonted level. He had never allowed himself to become utterly hopeless, yet he had become almost resigned to hope deferred; a pressing, present hope grew in him now. 'But it's ambiguous, you know,' he went on, smiling back. 'If I'm to stay as long as I will, I'm never to leave you, you know.'

Hope was becoming to Franklin. Althea felt herself colouring a little under his eyes. 'You still feel that?' she said rather feebly.

'I'll always feel that.'

'It's very wonderful of you, Franklin. It makes me, sometimes, feel guilty, as though I kept you from fuller happiness.'

'You can't do that. You are the only person who can give me fuller happiness.'

'And I give you happiness, like this—even like this?—really?'

'Of course; but,' he smiled a little forcedly, 'I can't pretend it's anything like what I want. I want a great deal.'

Althea's eyes fell before the intent and gentle gaze.

'Dear Franklin—I wish——'

'You wish you could? I wonder—I wonder, Althea, if you feel a little nearer to it just now. I seem to feel, myself, that you are.'

Was she? How she wished she were. Yet the wish was mixed with fear. She said, faltering, 'Don't ask me now. I'm so glad to see you—so glad; but that's not the same thing, is it?'

'It may be on the way to it.'

'May it?' she sighed tremblingly.

There was a silence; and then, taking her hand again, he again kissed it, and holding it for an insistent moment said, 'Althea, won't you try being engaged to me?'

She said nothing, turning away her face.

'You might make a habit of loving me, you know,' he went on half whimsically. 'No one would know anything about it. It would be our secret, our little experiment. If only you'd try it. Dearest, I do love you so deeply.'

And then—how it was she did not know, but it was again Franklin's words rather than Franklin that moved her, so that he must have seen the yielding to his love, if not to him, in her face—she was in his arms, and he was kissing her and saying, 'O Althea, won't you try?'

Althea's mind whirled. She needed to be kissed; that alone was evident; for she did not draw away; but the tears came, of perplexity and pathos, and she said, 'Franklin, dear Franklin, I'll try—I mean, I'll try to be in love with you—I can't be engaged, not really engaged—but I will try.'

'Darling—you are nearer it——'

'Yes—I don't know, Franklin—I mustn't bind myself. I can't marry you unless I am in love with you—can I, Franklin?'

'Well, I don't know about that,' said Franklin, his voice a little shaken. 'You can't expect me to give you an impartial answer to that now—can you, dear? I feel as if I wanted you to marry me on the chance you'd come to love me. And you do care for me enough for this, don't you? That in itself is such an incredible gift.'

Yes, she evidently cared for him enough for this; and 'this' meant his arm about her, her hand in his, his eyes of devotion upon her, centre of his universe as she was. And 'this' had, after years of formality, incredibly indeed altered all their relation. But—to marry him—it meant all sorts of other things; it meant definitely giving up; it meant definitely taking on. What it meant taking on was Franklin's raylessness, Franklin's obscurity, Franklin's dun-colour—could a wife escape the infection? What it meant giving up was more vague, but it floated before her as the rose-coloured dream of her youth—the hero, the earnest, ardent hero, who was to light all life to rapture and significance. And, absurdly, while the drift of glamour and regret floated by, and while she sat with Franklin's arm about her, her hand in his, it seemed to shape itself for a moment into the gay, irresponsible face of Gerald Digby. Absurd, indeed; he was neither earnest nor ardent, and if he were he would never feel earnestness or ardour on her account. Franklin certainly responded, in that respect, to the requirements of her dream. Yet—ah, yet—he responded in no other. It was not enough to have eyes only for her. A hero should draw others' eyes upon him; should have rays that others could recognise. Althea was troubled, and she was also ashamed of herself, but whether because of that vision of Gerald Digby, or whether because she was allowing Franklin privileges never allowed before, she did not know. Only the profundity of reverence that beamed upon her from Franklin's eyes enabled her to regain her self-respect.

Smiling a little constrainedly, she drew her hand from his and rose. 'I mustn't bind myself,' she repeated, standing with downcast eyes before him, 'but I'll try; indeed, I'll try.'

'You want to be in love with me, if only you can manage it, don't you, dear?' he questioned; and to this she could truthfully reply, 'Yes, dear Franklin, I want to be in love with you.'

CHAPTER X.

Althea found, as she had hoped, that her whole situation was altered by the arrival of her suitor. A woman boasting the possession of even the most rayless of that species is in a very different category from the woman as mere unsought unit. As unit she sinks easily into the background, is merged with other unemphatic things, but as sought she is always in the foreground, not only in her own, but in others' eyes. Be she ever so unnoticeable, she then gains, at least, the compliment of conjecture. The significance of her personal drama has a universal interest; the issues of her situation are those that appeal forcibly to all.

Althea and her steady, sallow satellite, became the centre of a watchful circle; watchful and kindly. Even to others her charms became more apparent, as, indeed, they were more actual. To be loved and to live in the presence of the adorer is the most beautifying of circumstances. Althea bloomed under it. Her eyes became larger, sweeter, sadder; her lips softer; the mild fever of her indecision and of her sense of power burned dimly in her cheeks. As the centre of watchfulness she gained the grace of self-confidence.

Aunt Julia, observant and shrewd, smiled with half-ironic satisfaction. She had felt sure that Althea must come to this, and 'this,' she considered as on the whole fortunate for Althea. Anything, Aunt Julia thought, was better than to become a wandering old maid, and she had, moreover, the highest respect for Franklin Winslow Kane. As a suitor for one of her own girls he would, of course, have been impossible; but her girls she placed in a different category from Althea; they had the rights of youth, charm, and beauty.

The girls, for their part, though seeing Franklin as a fair object for chaff, conceived of him as wholly suitable. Though they chaffed him, they never did so to his disadvantage, and they were respectful spectators of his enterprise. They had the nicest sense of loyalty for serious situations.

And Miss Buckston was of all the most satisfactory in her attitude. Her contempt for the disillusions and impediments of marriage could not prevent her from feeling an altogether new regard for a person to whom marriage was so obviously open; moreover, she thought Mr. Kane highly interesting. She at once informed Althea that she always found American men vastly the superior in achievement and energy to the much-vaunted American woman, and Althea was not displeased. She was amused but gratified, when Miss Buckston told her what were Franklin's good qualities, and said that though he had many foolish democratic notions, he was more worth while talking to than any man she had met for a long time. She took every opportunity for talking to him about sociology, science, and international themes, and Althea even became a little irked by the frequency of these colloquies and tempted sometimes to withdraw Franklin from them; but the subtle flattery that Miss Buckston's interest in Franklin offered to herself was too acceptable for her to yield to such impulses. Yes, Franklin had a right to his air of careful elation; she had never been so near it. She had not again allowed him to kiss her—she was still rather ashamed when she remembered how often she had, on that one occasion, allowed him to kiss her; yet, in spite of her swift stepping back to discretion, she had never in all her life been so near to saying 'yes' to Franklin as during the eight or ten days after his arrival. And the fact that a third postcard from Helen expressed even further vagueness as to the chance of Gerald's being able to be with them that autumn at Merriston, added to the sense of inevitability. Althea had been for this time so absorbed in Franklin, his effect on others and on herself, that she had not felt, as she would otherwise have done, Helen's unsatisfactory attitude. Helen was at last coming, and she was fluttered at the thought of her coming, but she was far more able to cope with Helen; there was more self to do it with; she was stronger, more independent of Helen's opinion and of Helen's affection. But dimly she felt also—hardly aware she felt it—that she was a more effective self as the undecided recipient of Franklin's devotion than as his affianced wife. A rayless person, it seemed, could crown one with beams as long as one maintained one's distance from him; merged with him one shared his insignificance. To accept Franklin might be to shear them both of all the radiance they borrowed from each other.

Helen arrived on a very hot evening in mid-August. She had lost the best train, which brought one to Merriston at tea-time—Althea felt that Helen was the sort of person who would always lose the best train—and after a tedious journey, with waits and changes at hot stations, she received her friend's kisses just as the dressing-bell for dinner sounded. Helen, standing among her boxes, while Amélie hurriedly got out her evening things, looked extremely tired, and felt, Althea was sure, extremely ill-tempered. It was characteristic of Helen, she knew it intuitively, to feel ill-temper, and yet to have it so perfectly under control that it made her manner sweeter than usual. Her sense of social duty never failed her, and it did not in the least fail her now as she smiled at Althea, and, while she drank the cup of tea that had been brought to her, gave an account of her misfortunes. She had arrived in London from Scotland the night before, spent two hours of the morning in frantic shopping—the shops like ovens and the London pavements exhaling a torrid heat; had found, on getting back to Aunt Grizel's—Aunt Grizel was away—that the silly maid had muddled all her packing; then, late already, had hurled herself into a cab, and observed, half-way to the station, that the horse was on the point of collapse; had changed cabs and had arrived at the station to see her train just going out. 'So there I paced up and down like a caged, suffocating lioness for over an hour, had a loathsome lunch, and read half a dozen papers before my train started, I came third class with a weary mother and two babies, the sun beat in all the way, and I had three changes. I'm hardly fit to be seen, and not fit to speak. But, yes, I'll have a bath and come down in time for something to eat. I'd rather come down; please don't wait for me.'

They did, however, and she was very late. The windows in the drawing-room were widely open to the evening air, and the lamps had not yet been lit; and when Helen came she made Althea think a little of a beautiful grey moth, hovering vaguely in the dusk.

Captain Merton dined with them that evening, and young Harry Evans, son of a neighbouring squire; and Herbert Vaughan was still at Merriston, the masculine equivalent of Mildred and Dorothy, an exquisitely appointed youth, frank and boisterous, with charming, candid eyes, and the figure of an Adonis. These young men's eyes were fixed upon Helen as they took their places at the dinner-table, though not altogether, Althea perceived, with admiration. Helen, wherever she was, would always be centre; things and people grouped themselves about her; she made the picture, and she was the focus of interest. Why was it? Althea wondered, as, with almost a mother's wistful pleasure, she watched her friend and watched the others watch her. Pale, jaded, in her thin grey dress, haggard and hardly beautiful, Helen was full of apathetic power, and Helen was interested in nobody. It was Althea's pride to trace out reasons and to see in what Helen's subjugating quality consisted. Franklin had taken Helen in, and she herself sat at some distance from them, her heart beating fast as she wondered what Helen would think of him. She could not hear what they said, but she could see that they talked, though not eagerly. Helen had, as usual, the air of giving her attention to anything put before her. One never could tell in the least what she really thought of it. She smiled with pale lips and weary eyes upon Franklin, listened to him gravely and with concentration, and, when she did speak, it was, once or twice, with gaiety, as though he had amused and surprised her. Yet Althea felt that her thoughts were far from Franklin, far from everybody in the room. And meanwhile, of everybody in the room, it was the lean, sallow young man beside her who seemed at once the least impressed and the most interested. But that was so like Franklin; no one could outdo him in interest, and no one could outdo him in placidity. That he could examine Helen with his calm, careful eye, as though she were an object for mental and moral appraisement only; that he could see her so acutely, and yet remain so unmoved by her rarity, at once pleased and displeased Althea. It showed him as so safe, but it showed him as so narrow. She found herself thinking almost impatiently that Franklin simply had no sense of charm at all. Helen interested him, but she did not stir in him the least wistfulness or wonder, as charm should do. Miss Buckston interested him, too. And she was very sure that Franklin while liking Helen as a human creature—so he liked Miss Buckston—disapproved of her as a type. Of course, he must disapprove of her. Didn't she contradict all the things he approved of—all the laboriousness, the earnestness, the tolerant bias towards the views and feelings of the majority? And Althea felt, with a rather sharp satisfaction, that it would give her some pleasure to show Franklin that she differed from him; that she had other tastes than his, other needs—needs which Helen more than satisfied.

She had no opportunity that night for fathoming Helen's impressions of Franklin, and indeed felt that the task was a delicate one to undertake. If Helen didn't volunteer them she could hardly ask for them. Loyalty to Franklin and to the old bond between them, to say nothing of the new, made it unfit that Helen should know that her impressions of Franklin were of any weight with her friend. But the next morning Helen did not come down to breakfast, and there was no reason why, in a stroll round the garden with Franklin afterwards, she should not be point blank; the only unfairness here was that in his opinion of Helen it would not be Helen he judged, but himself.

'How do you like her, my new friend?' she asked.

Franklin was very willing to talk and had already clear impressions. The clearest was the one he put at once before her in the vernacular he had never taken the least pains to modify. 'She looks sick; I'd be worried about her if I were you. Can't you rouse her?'

'Rouse her? She is always like that. Only she was particularly tired last night.'

'A healthy young woman oughtn't to get so tired. If she's always like that she always needs rousing.'

'Don't be ridiculous, Franklin. What do you mean?'

'Why, I'm perfectly serious. I think she looks sick. She ought to take tonics and a lot of outdoor exercise.'

'Is that all that you can find to say about her?' Althea asked, half amused and half indignant.

'Why no,' Franklin replied. 'I think she's very attractive; she has a great deal of poise. Only she's half alive. I'd like to see her doing something.'

'It's enough for her to be, I think.'

'Enough for you, perhaps; but is it enough for her? She'd be a mighty lot happier if she had some work.'

'Really, Franklin, you are absurd,' said Althea laughing. 'There is room in the world, thank goodness, for other people besides people who work.'

'Oh no, there isn't; not really. The trouble with the world is that they're here and have to be taken care of; there's not room for them. It's lovely of you to care so much about her,' he went on, turning his bright gaze upon her. 'I see how you care for her. It's because of that—for her sake, you know—what it can mean to her—that I emphasise the side that needs looking after. You look after her, Althea; that'll be the best thing that can happen to her.'

With all his acuteness, how guileless he was, the dear! She saw herself 'looking after' Helen!

'You might have a great deal of influence on her,' Franklin added.

Althea struggled for a moment with her pride. She liked Franklin to have this high opinion of her ministering powers, and yet she liked even more to have the comfort of confiding in him; and she was willing to add to Helen's impressiveness at the expense of her own. 'I've no influence with her,' she said. 'I never shall have. I don't believe that any one could influence Helen.'

Franklin looked fixedly at her for some time as though probing what there must be of pain for her in this avowal. Then he said, 'That's too bad. Too bad for her, I mean. You're all right, dear. She doesn't know what she misses.'

They sat out on the lawn that afternoon in the shade of the great trees. Mildred and Dorothy, glittering in white, played lawn-tennis indefatigably with Herbert Vaughan and Captain Merton. Aunt Julia embroidered, and Miss Buckston read a review with a concentrated brow and an occasional ejaculation of disapproval. Helen was lying prone in a green linen chair; her garden hat was bent over her eyes and she seemed to doze. Franklin sat on the grass in front of Althea, just outside the radius of shadow, clasping his thin knees with his thin hands. He looked at his worst out of doors, on a lawn and under trees. He was typically civic. Even with his attempts to adapt his clothes to rural requirements, he was out of place. His shoes seemed to demand a pavement, and his thin grey coat and trousers an office stool. Althea also eyed his tie with uncertainty. He wasn't right; he didn't in the least look like Herbert Vaughan, who was elegant, or like Captain Merton, who was easy. He sat out in the sunlight, undisturbed by it, though he screwed up his features in a very unbecoming way while he talked, the sun in his eyes. In her cool green shadow, Helen now and then opened her eyes and looked at him, and Althea wished that he would not remain in so resolutely disadvantageous a situation.

'See here, Althea,' he was saying, 'if you've gone so much into this matter'—the topic was that of sweated industries—'I don't see how you can avoid feeling responsible—making some use of all you know. I don't ask you to come home to do it, though we need you and your kind badly there, but you ought to lend a hand here.'

'I don't really think I could be of any use,' said Althea.

'With all your knowledge of political economy? Why, Miss Buckston could set you to something at once. Knowledge is always of use, isn't it, Miss Buckston?'

'Yes, if one cares enough about things to put them through,' said Miss Buckston. 'I always tell Althea that she might make herself very useful to me.'

'Exactly,' said Franklin. 'And she does care. All you need do, Althea, is to harness yourself. You mustn't drift.'

'The number of drifting American women one sees over here!' Miss Buckston ejaculated; to which Franklin cheerfully replied: 'Oh, we'll work them all in; they are of use to us in their own way, though they often don't know it. They are learning a lot; they are getting equipped. The country will get the good of it some day. Look at Althea, for instance. You might say she drifted, but she's been a hard scholar; I know it; all she needs now is to get harnessed.'

It was not lover-like talk; yet what talk, in its very impartiality, could from a lover be more gratifying? Althea again glanced at Helen, but Helen again seemed to slumber. Her face in repose had a look of discontent and sorrow, and Franklin's eyes, following her own, no doubt recognised what she did. He observed Helen for some moments before returning to the theme of efficiency.

It was a little later on that Althea's opportunity—and crisis—came. Aunt Julia had gone in and Miss Buckston suggested to Franklin that he should take a turn with her before tea. Franklin got up at once and walked away beside her, and Althea knew that his alacrity was the greater because he felt that by going with Miss Buckston he left her alone with her cherished friend. As he and Miss Buckston disappeared in the shrubberies, Helen opened her eyes and looked at them.

'How do you like Miss Buckston now that you see her at closer quarters?' Althea asked, hoping to approach the subject that preoccupied her by a circuitous method.

Helen smiled. 'One hardly likes her better at closer quarters, does one? She is like a gun going off every few moments.'

Althea smiled too; she no longer felt many qualms of loyalty on Miss Buckston's behalf.

Helen said no more, and the subject was still unapproached. 'And how do you like Mr. Kane?' Althea now felt herself forced to add.

She had not intended to use that casual tone, nearly the same tone that she had used for Miss Buckston. But she had a dimly apprehended and strongly felt wish not to forestall any verdict of Helen's; to make sure that Helen should have an open field for pronouncing her verdict candidly. Yet she was hardly prepared for the candour of Helen's reply, though in the shock that attended it she knew in a moment that she had brought it upon herself. One didn't question people about one's near friends in that casual tone.

'Funny little man,' said Helen.

After the shock of it—her worst suspicions confirmed—it was a deep qualm that Althea felt, a qualm in which she knew that something definite and final had happened to her; something sharp yet vague, all blurred by the balmy softness of the day, the sense of physical well-being, the beauty of green branches and bays of deep blue sky above. It was difficult to know, for a moment, just what had happened, for it was not as if she had ever definitely told herself that she intended to marry Franklin. The clearest contrast between the moment of revelation and that which had gone before lay in the fact that not until Helen spoke those idle, innocent words had she ever definitely told herself that she could never marry him. And there was a pang in the knowledge, and with it a drowsy lassitude, as of relief and certainty. The reason now was there; it gazed at her. Not that she couldn't have seen it for herself, but pity, loneliness, the craving for love had blinded her. Franklin was a funny little man, and that was why she could not marry him. And now, with the lassitude, the relief from long tension, came a feeling of cold and sickness.

Helen, baleful in her unconsciousness, had again closed her eyes. Althea looked at her, and she was aware of being angry with Helen. She was further aware that, since all was over for Franklin, she owed him something. She owed it to him at least to make clear to Helen that she didn't place him with Miss Buckston.

'Yes,' she said, 'Franklin is funny in his way. He is very quaint and original and simple; but he is a dear, too, you know.'

Helen did not open her eyes. 'I'm sure he is,' she acquiesced. Her placid acceptance of whatever interpretation of Mr. Kane Althea should choose to set before her, made Althea still angrier—with herself and with Helen.

'He is quite a noted scientist,' she went on, keeping her voice smooth, 'and has a very interesting new theory about atoms that's exciting a good deal of attention.'

Her voice was too successful; Helen still suspected nothing. 'Yes,' she said. 'Really.'

'You mustn't judge him from his appearance,' said Althea, smiling, for Helen had now opened her eyes and was looking dreamily at the lawn-tennis players.' His clothes are odd, of course; he doesn't know how to dress; but his eyes are fine; one sees the thinker in them.' She hoped by sacrificing Franklin's clothes to elicit some appreciation of his eyes. But Helen merely acquiesced again with: 'Yes; he doesn't know how to dress.'

'He isn't at all well off, you know,' said Althea. 'Indeed, he is quite poor. He spends most of his money on research and philanthropy.'

'Ah, well!' Helen commented, 'it's extraordinary how little difference money makes if a man knows how to dress.'

The thought of Gerald Digby went like a dart through Althea's mind. He was poor. She remembered his socks and ties, his general rightness. She wondered how much he spent on his clothes. She was silent for a moment, struggling with her trivial and with her deep discomfitures, and she saw the figures of Miss Buckston and of Franklin—both so funny, both so earnest—appear at the farther edge of the lawn engaged in strenuous converse. Helen looked at them too, kindly and indifferently. 'That would be quite an appropriate attachment, wouldn't it?' she remarked. 'They seem very much interested in each other, those two.'

Althea grew very red. Her mind knew a horrid wrench. She did not know whether it was in pride of possessorship, or shame of it, or merely in helpless loyalty that, after a pause, she said: 'Perhaps I ought to have told you, Helen, that Franklin has wanted to marry me for fifteen years. I've no intention of accepting him; but no one can judge as I can of how big and dear a person he is—in spite of his funniness.' As she spoke she remembered—it was with a gush of undiluted dismay—that to Helen she had in Paris spoken of the 'delightful' suitor, the 'only one.' Did Helen remember? And how could Helen connect that delightful 'one' with Franklin, and with her own attitude towards Franklin?

But Helen now had turned her eyes upon her, opening them—it always seemed to be with difficulty that she did it—widely. 'My dear,' she said, 'I do beg your pardon. You never gave me a hint.'

How, indeed, could the Paris memory have been one?

'There wasn't any hint to give, exactly,' said Althea, blushing more deeply and trying to prevent the tears from rising. 'I'm not in the least in love with Franklin. I never shall be.'

'No, of course not,' Helen replied, full of solicitude. 'Only, as you say, you must know him so well;—to have him talked over, quite idly and ignorantly, as I've been talking.—Really, you ought to have stopped me.'

'There was no reason for stopping you. I can see Franklin with perfect detachment. I see him just as you do, only I see so much more. His devotion to me is a rare thing; it has always made me feel unworthy.'

'Dear me, yes. Fifteen years, you say; it's quite extraordinary,' said Helen.

To Althea it seemed that Helen's candour was merciless, and revealed her to herself as uncandid, crooked, and devious. It was with a stronger wish than ever to atone to Franklin that she persisted: 'He is extraordinary; that's what I mean about him. I am devoted to him. And my consolation is that since I can't give him love he finds my friendship the next best thing in life.'

'Really?' Helen repeated. She was silent then, evidently not considering herself privileged to ask questions; and the silence was fraught for Althea with keenest discomfort. It was only after a long pause that at last, tentatively and delicately, as though she guessed that Althea perhaps was resenting something, and perhaps wanted her to ask questions, Helen said: 'And—you don't think you can ever take him?'

'My dear Helen! How can you ask me? He isn't a man to fall in love with, is he?'

'No, certainly not,' said Helen, smiling a little constrainedly, as though her friend's vehemence struck her as slightly excessive. 'But he might, from what you tell me, be a man to marry.'

'I couldn't marry a man I was not in love with.'

'Not if he were sufficiently in love with you? Such faithful and devoted people are rare.'

'You know, Helen, that, however faithful and devoted he were, you couldn't fancy yourself marrying Franklin.'

Helen, at this turning of the tables, looked slightly disconcerted. 'Well, as you say, I hardly know him,' she suggested.

'However well you knew him, you do know that under no circumstances could you marry him.'

'No, I suppose not.'

Her look of readjustment was inflicting further and subtler wounds.

'Can't I feel in the same way?' said Althea.

Helen, a little troubled by the feeling she could not interpret in her friend's voice, hesitated before saying—as though in atonement to Mr. Kane she felt bound to put his case as favourably as possible: 'It doesn't quite follow, does it, that somebody who would suit you would suit me? We are so different, aren't we?'

'Different? How?'

'Well, I could put up with a very inferior, frivolous sort of person. You'd have higher ideas altogether.'

Althea still tried to smile. 'You mean that Franklin is too high an idea for you?'

'Far, far too high,' said Helen, smiling back.

Franklin and Miss Buckston were now approaching them, and Althea had to accept this ambiguous result of the conversation. One result, however, was not ambiguous. She seemed to see Franklin, as he came towards her over the thick sward, in a new light, a light that diminished and removed him; so that while her heart ached over him as it had never ached, it yet, strangely, was hardened towards him, and almost hostile. How had she not seen for herself, clearly and finally, that she and Helen were alike, and that whether it was that Franklin was too high, or whether it was that Franklin was merely funny—for either or for both reasons, Franklin could never be for her.

Her heart was hard and aching; but above everything else one hot feeling pulsed: Helen should not have said that he was funny and then glided to the point where she left him as too high for herself, yet not too high for her friend. She should not have withdrawn from her friend and stranded her with Franklin Winslow Kane.

CHAPTER XI.

In the course of the next few days Miss Buckston went back to her Surrey cottage, and two friends of Helen's arrived. Helen was fulfilling her promise of giving Althea all the people she wanted. Lady Pickering was widowed, young, coquettish, and pretty; Sir Charles Brewster a lively young bachelor with high eyebrows, upturned tips to his moustache, and an air of surprise and competence. They made great friends at once with Mildred, Dorothy and Herbert Vaughan, who shared in all Sir Charles's hunting and yachting interests. Lady Pickering, after a day of tennis and flirtation, would drift at night into Dorothy and Mildred's rooms to talk of dresses, and for some days wore her hair tied in a large black bow behind, reverting, however, to her usual dishevelled picturesqueness. 'One needs to look as innocent as a pony to have that bow really suit one,' she said.

Althea, in this accession of new life, again felt relegated to the background. Helen did not join in the revels, but there was no air of being relegated about her; she might have been the jaded and kindly queen before whom they were enacted. 'Dear Helen,' said Lady Pickering to Mildred and Althea, 'I can see that she's down on her luck and very bored with life. But it's always nice having her about, isn't it? Always nice to have her to look at.'

Althea felt that her guests found no such decorative uses for herself, and that they took it for granted that, with a suitor to engage her attention, she would be quite satisfied to remain outside, even if above, the gayer circle. She could not deny that her acceptance of Franklin's devotion before Helen's arrival, their air of happy withdrawal—a withdrawal that had then made them conspicuous, not negligible—absolutely justified her guests in their over-tactfulness. They still took it for granted that she and Franklin wanted to be alone together; they still left them in an isolation almost bridal; but now Althea did not want to be left alone with Franklin, and above all wished to detach herself from any bridal association; and she tormented herself with accusations concerning her former graciousness, responsible as it was for her present discomfort. She knew that she was very fond of dear Franklin, and that she always would be fond of him, but, with these accusations crowding thickly upon her, she was ill at ease and unhappy in his presence. What could she say to Franklin? 'I did, indeed, deceive myself into thinking that I might be able to marry you, and I let you see that I thought it; and then my friend's chance words showed me that I never could. What am I to think of myself, Franklin? And what can you think of me?' For though she could no longer feel pride in Franklin's love; though it had ceased, since Helen's words, to have any decorative value in her eyes, its practical value was still great; she could not think of herself as not loved by Franklin. Her world would have rocked without that foundation beneath it; and the fear that Franklin might, reading her perplexed, unstable heart, feel her a person no longer to be loved, was now an added complication.

'O Franklin, dear Franklin!' she said to him suddenly one day, turning upon him eyes enlarged by tears, 'I feel as if I were guilty towards you.'

She almost longed to put her head on his shoulder, to pour out all her grief, and be understood and comforted. Franklin had not been slow to recognise the change in his beloved's attitude towards him. He had shown no sign of grievance or reproach; he seemed quite prepared for her reaction from the moment of only dubious hope, and, though quite without humility, to find it natural, however painful to himself, that Althea should be rather bored after so much of him. But the gentle lighting of his face now showed her, too, that her reticence and withdrawal had hurt more than the new loss of hope.

'You mean,' he said, trying to smile a little as he said it, 'you mean that you've found out that you can't, dear?'

She stood, stricken by the words and their finality, and she slowly nodded, while two large tears rolled down her cheeks.

Franklin Kane controlled the signs of his own emotion, which was deep. 'That's all right, dear,' he said. 'You're not guilty of anything. You've been a little too kind—more than you can keep up, I mean. It's been beautiful of you to be kind at all and to think you might be kinder. Would you rather I went away? Perhaps it's painful to have me about just now. I've got a good many places I can go to while I'm over here, you know. You mustn't have me on your mind.'

'O Franklin!' Althea almost sobbed; 'you are an angel. Of course I want you to stay for as long as you will; of course I love to have you here.' He was an angel, indeed, she felt, and another dart of hostility towards Helen went through her—Helen, cynical, unspiritual, blind to angels.

So Franklin stayed on, and the next day another guest arrived. It was at breakfast that Althea found at her place a little note from Gerald Digby asking her very prettily if she could take him in that evening. He was in town and would start at once if she could wire that he might come. Althea controlled, as best she could, her shock of delight. He had, then, intended to come; he had not forgotten all about her. Even if she counted only in his memory as tenant, it was good, she felt it helplessly and blissfully, to count in any way with Gerald Digby. She did not analyse and hardly recognised these sentiments, yet she strongly felt the need for composure, and it was only with an air of soft exhilaration that she made the announcement over the table to Helen. 'Isn't it nice, Helen? Mr. Digby is coming this evening.' The soft exhilaration could not be noticeable, for everybody seemed in some degree to share it.

'Dear Gerald, how delightful!' said Lady Pickering, with, to Althea's consciousness, too much an air of possessorship. 'Gerald is a splendid actor, Miss Pepperell,' Sir Charles said to Dorothy. 'Miss Buchanan, you and he must do some of your best parts together.' The girls were full of expectancy. It was Helen herself who looked least illuminated by the news; but then, as Althea realised, to Helen Gerald must be the most matter-of-fact thing in life.

They were all sitting under the trees on the lawn when Gerald arrived; he had not lost the best train. Every one was in white, except Helen who wore black, and Franklin who wore grey; every one was lolling on the grass or extended on chairs, except Aunt Julia, erect and embroidering, and Althea who was giving her attention to tea. It had just been poured out when Gerald came strolling over the lawn towards them.

He carried his Panama hat doubled in his hand; he looked exquisitely cool, and he glanced about him as he came, well pleased, apparently, to find himself again in his old home. Althea felt his manner of approaching them to be characteristic; it was at once so desultory and so pleasant.

'You look like a flock of doves,' he said, as, smiling, he took Althea's welcoming hand and surveyed the group. 'Hello, Helen, how are you? Hello, Charlie; and how nice to find you, Frances.'

He was introduced to the others, continuing to smile with marked approbation, Althea felt, upon Mildred and Dorothy, who certainly looked charming, and then he dropped on the grass beside Lady Pickering's chair.

Althea knew that if she looked like a dove, she felt like a very fluttering one. She was much moved by this welcoming of Mr. Digby to his home, and she wondered if the quickened beating of her heart manifested itself in any change of glance or colour. She soon felt, however, as she distributed teacups and looked about her circle, that if she were visibly moved Mr. Digby would not be aware of the fact. The fact, obviously, that he was most aware of was Lady Pickering's presence, and he was talking to her with a lightness and gaiety that she could presently only define, for her own discomfort, as flirtation. Althea had had little experience of flirting, and the little had not been personal. It had remained for her always a rather tasteless, rather ludicrous spectacle; yet Mr. Digby's manner of flirting, if flirting it was, was neither. It was graceful, unemphatic, composed of playful repartee and merry glances. It was Lady Pickering who overdid her side of the dialogue and brought to it a significance that Mr. Digby's eyes and smile disowned even while they evoked it. One of the things of which Mr. Digby had shown himself most completely unaware was Franklin Kane, who sat, as usual, just outside the circle in the sun, balancing his tea-cup on his raised knees and 'Fletcherising' a slice of cake. Gerald had glanced at him as one might glance—Althea had felt it keenly—at some nice little insect on one's path, a pleasant insect, but too small to warrant any attention beyond a casual recognition of type. But Franklin, who had a casual interest in nobody, was very much aware of the newcomer, and he gazed attentively at Gerald Digby as he had gazed at Helen on the first evening of their meeting, with less of interest perhaps, but with much the same dispassionate intentness; and Althea felt sure that he already did not approve of Gerald Digby.

She asked Helen that evening, lightly, as Helen had asked an equivalent question about Franklin and Miss Buckston, whether Mr. Digby and Lady Pickering were in love; she felt sure that they were not in love, which made the question easier.

'Oh no; not at all, I fancy,' said Helen.

'I only asked,' said Althea, 'because it seemed the obvious explanation.'

'You mean their way of flirting.'

'Yes. I suppose I'm not used to flirtation, not to such extreme flirtation. I don't like it, do you?'

'I don't know that I do; but Gerald is only a flirt through sympathy and good nature. It's Frances who leads him on; she is a flirt by temperament.'

'I'm glad of that,' said Althea. 'I'm sure he is too nice to be one by temperament.'

'After all, it's a very harmless diversion.'

'Do you think it harmless? It pains me to see a sacred thing being mimicked.'

'I hardly think it's a sacred thing Frances and Gerald are mimicking,' Helen smiled.

'It's love, isn't it?'

'Love of such a trivial order that I can't feel anything is being taken in vain.'

Helen was amused, yet touched by her friend's standards. Such distaste was not unknown to her, and Gerald's sympathetic propensities had caused her qualms with which she could not have imagined that Althea's had any analogy. Yet it was not her own taste she was considering that evening after dinner when, in walking up and down with Gerald on the gravelled terrace outside the drawing-room, she told him of Althea's standards. She felt responsible for Gerald, and that she owed it to Althea that he should not be allowed to displease her. It had struck her more than once, immersed in self-centred cogitations as she was, that Althea was altogether too much relegated.

'I wish you and Frances would not go on as you do, Gerald,' she said. 'It disturbs Althea, I am sure. She is not used to seeing people behaving like that.'

'Behaving?' asked the innocent Gerald. 'How have I been behaving?'

'Very foolishly. You have been flirting, and rather flagrantly, with Frances, ever since you came.'

'But, my dear, you know perfectly well that one can't talk to Frances without flirting with her. All conversation becomes flirtation. The most guileless glance, in meeting her eye, is transmuted, like a straight stick looking crooked when you put it into water, you know. Frances has a charmingly deviating quality that I defy the straightest of intentions to evade.'

'Are yours so straight?'

'Well—she is pretty and pleasant, and perfectly superficial, as you know. I own that I do rather like to put the stick in the water and see what happens to it.'

'Well, don't put it in too often before Althea. After all, you are all of you here because of her friendship with me, and it makes me feel guilty if I see her having a bad time because of your misbehaviour.'

'A bad time?'

'Really. She takes things hard. She said it was mimicking a sacred thing.'

'Oh! but, I say, how awfully funny, Helen. You must own that it's funny.'

'Funny, but sweet, too.'

'She is a sweet creature, of course, one can see that; and her moral approvals and disapprovals are firmly fixed, however funny; one likes that in her. I'll try to be good, if Frances will let me. She looked quite pretty this evening, Miss Jakes; only she dresses too stiffly. What's the matter? Couldn't you give her a hint? She is like a satin-box, and a woman ought to be like a flower; ought to look as if they'd bend if a breeze went over them. Now you can't imagine Miss Jakes bending; she'd have to stoop.'

Helen, in the darkness, smiled half bitterly, half affectionately. Gerald's nonsense always pleased her, even when she was most exasperated with him. She was not exasperated with Gerald in particular just now, but with everything and everybody, herself included, and the fact that he liked to flirt flagrantly with Lady Pickering did not move her more than usual. It was not a particular but a general irritation that edged her voice a little as she said, drawing her black scarf more closely round her shoulders, 'Frances must satisfy you there. Your tastes, I think, are becoming more and more dishevelled.'

But innocent Gerald answered with a coal of fire: 'No, she is too dishevelled. You satisfy my tastes there entirely; you flow, but you don't flop. Now if Miss Jakes would only try to dress like you she'd be immensely improved. You are perfect.' And he lightly touched her scarf as he spoke with a fraternal and appreciative hand.

Helen continued to smile in the darkness, but it was over an almost irresistible impulse to sob. The impulse was so strong that it frightened her, and it was with immense relief that she saw Althea's figure—her 'box-like' figure—appear in the lighted window. She did not want to talk to Althea, and she could not, just now, go on talking to Gerald. From their corner of the terrace she indicated the vaguely gazing Althea. 'There she is,' she said. 'Go and talk to her. Be nice to her. I'm tired and am going to have a stroll in the shrubberies before bed.'

She left Gerald obediently, if not eagerly, moving towards the window, and slipping into the obscurity of the shrubberies she threw back her scarf and drew long breaths. She was becoming terribly overwrought. It had been, since so long, a second nature to live two lives that any danger of their merging affected her with a dreadful feeling of disintegration. There was the life of comradeship, the secure little compartment where Gerald was at home, so at home that he could tell her she was perfect and touch her scarf with an approving hand, and from this familiar shelter she had looked for so long, with the calmest eye, upon his flirtations, and in it had heard, unmoved, his encomiums upon herself. The other life, the real life, was all outdoors in comparison; it was all her real self, passionate, untamed, desolate; it was like a bleak, wild moorland, and the social, the comrade self only a strongly built little lodge erected, through stress of wind and weather, in the midst of it. Since girlhood it had been a second nature to her to keep comradeship shut in and reality shut out. And to-night reality seemed to shake and batter at the doors.

She had come to Merriston House to rest, to drink eau rougie and to rest. She wanted to lapse into apathy and to recover, as far as might be, from her recent unpleasant experiments and experiences. Had she allowed herself any illusions about the experiment, the experience would have been humiliating; but Helen was not humiliated, she had not deceived herself for a moment. She had, open-eyed, been trying for the 'other things,' and she had only just missed them. She had intended to marry a very important person who much admired her. She had been almost sure that she could marry him if she wanted to, and she had found out that she couldn't. It had not been, as in her youth, her own shrinking and her own recoil at the last decisive moment. She had been resolved and unwavering; her discomfiture had been sudden and its cause the quite grotesque one of her admirer having fallen head over heels in love with a child of eighteen—a foolish, affected little child, who giggled and glanced and blushed opportunely, and who, beside these assets, had a skilful and determined mother. Without the mother to waylay, pounce, and fix, Helen did not believe that her sober, solid friend would have yielded to the momentary beguilement, and Helen herself deigned not one hint of contest; she had been resolved, but only to accept; she could never have waylaid or pounced. And now, apathetic, yet irritated, exhausted and sick at heart, she had been telling herself, as she lay in the garden-chairs at Merriston House, that it was more than probable that the time was over, even for the 'other things.' The prospect made her weary. What—with Aunt Grizel's one hundred and fifty a year—was she to do with herself in the future? What was to become of her? She didn't feel that she much cared, and yet it was all that there was left to care about, for Aunt Grizel's sake if not for her own, and she felt only fit to rest from the pressure of the question. To-night, as she turned and wandered among the trees, she said to herself that it hadn't been a propitious time to come for rest to Merriston House. Gerald had been the last person she desired to see just now. She had never been so near to feeling danger as to-night. If Gerald were nice to her—he always was—but nice in a certain way, the way that expressed so clearly his tenderness and his dreadful, his merciful unawareness, she might break down before him and sob. This would be too horrible, and when she thought that it might happen she felt, rising with the longing for tears, an old resentment against Gerald, fierce, absurd, and unconquerable. After making the round of the lawns and looking up hard and unseeingly at the stars, she came back to the terrace. Gerald and Althea were gone, and she surmised that Gerald had not taken much trouble to be nice. She was passing along an unillumined corner when she came suddenly upon a figure seated there—so suddenly that she almost fell against it. She murmured a hasty apology as Mr. Kane rose from a chair where, with folded arms, he had been seated, apparently in contemplation of the night.

'Oh, I beg your pardon,' said Helen. 'It's so dark here. I didn't see you.'

'And I didn't hear you coming,' said Mr. Kane. 'I beg your pardon. I'm afraid you hurt your foot.'

'Not at all,' Helen assured him. She had stepped into the light from the windows and, Mr. Kane being beside her, she could see his face clearly and see that he looked very tired. She had been aware, in these days of somnolent retirement, that one other member of the party seemed, though not in her sense retired from it, to wander rather aimlessly on its outskirts. That his removal to this ambiguous limbo had been the result of her own arrival Helen had no means of knowing, since she had never seen Mr. Kane in his brief moment of hope when he and Althea had been centre and everybody else outskirts. She had found him, during her few conversations with him, so tamely funny as to be hardly odd, though his manner of speaking and the way in which his hair was cut struck her as expressing oddity to an unfortunate degree; but though only dimly aware of him, and aware mainly in this sense of amusement, she had, since Althea had informed her of his status, seen him with some compassionateness. It didn't make him less funny to her that he should have been in love with Althea for fifteen years, rather it made him more so. Helen found it difficult to take either the devotion or its object very seriously. She thought hopeless passions rather ridiculous, her own included, but Gerald she did consider a possible object of passion; and how Althea could be an object of passion for anybody, even for funny little Mr. Kane, surpassed her comprehension, so that the only way to understand the situation was to decide that Mr. Kane was incapable of passion altogether. But to-night she received a new impression; looking at Mr. Kane's face, thin, jaded, and kindly attentive to herself, it suddenly became apparent to her that whatever his feeling might be it was serious. He might not know passion, but his heart was aching, perhaps quite as fiercely as her own. She felt sorry for Mr. Kane, and her step lingered on her way to the house.

'Isn't it a lovely night,' she said, in order to say something. 'Do you like sitting in the dark? It's very restful, isn't it?'

Franklin saw the alien Miss Buchanan's eyes bent kindly and observantly upon him.

'Yes, it's very restful,' he said. 'It smooths you out and straightens you out when you get crumpled, you know, and impatient.'

'I should not imagine you as ever very impatient,' smiled Helen. 'Perhaps you do sit a great deal in the dark.'

He took her whimsical suggestion with careful humour. 'Why, no, it's not a habit of mine; and it's not a recipe that it would be a good thing to overdo, is it?'

'Why not?' she asked.

'There are worse things than impatience, aren't there?' said Franklin. 'Gloominess, for instance. You might get gloomy if you sat out in the dark a great deal.'

It amused her a little to wonder, as they went in together, whether Mr. Kane disciplined his emotions and withdrew from restful influences before they had time to become discouraging ones. She imagined that he would have a recipe for everything.

CHAPTER XII.

It was after this little nocturnal encounter that Helen found herself watching Mr. Kane with a dim, speculative sympathy. There was nothing else of much interest to watch, as far as she was aware, for Helen's powers of observation were not sharpened by much imaginativeness. Her sympathy must be aroused for her to care to see, and just now she felt no sympathy for any one but Mr. Kane.

Gerald, flirting far less flagrantly and sketching assiduously, was in no need of sympathy; nor Althea, despite the fact that Helen felt her to be a little reserved and melancholy. Althea, on the whole, seemed placidly enough absorbed in her duties of hostess, and her state of mind, at no time much preoccupying Helen, preoccupied her now less than ever. The person who really interested her, now that she had come to look at him and to realise that he was suffering, was Mr. Kane. He was puzzling to her, not mystifying; there was no element of depth or shadow about him; even his suffering—it was odd to think that a person with such a small, flat nose should suffer—even his suffering was pellucid. He puzzled her because he was different from anything she had ever encountered, and he made her think of a page of trite phrases printed in a half-comprehended dialect. If it was puzzling that any man should be sufficiently in love with Althea to suffer over it, it was yet more puzzling that, neglected as he so obviously was by his beloved, he should show no dejection or consciousness of diminution. He seemed a little aimless, it is true, but not in the least injured; and Helen, as she watched him, found herself liking Mr. Kane.

He had an air, pleasant to her, of finding no one beneath him, and at the same time he seemed as unaware of superiority—unless it were definitely moral or intellectual. A general indiscriminating goodwill was expressed in his manner towards everybody, and when he did discriminate—which was always on moral issues—his goodwill seemed unperturbed by any amount of reprobation. He remained blandly humane under the most disconcerting circumstances. She overtook him one day in a lane holding a drunkard by the shoulder and endeavouring to steer him homeward, while he expounded to him in scientific tones the ill effects of alcohol on the system, and the remarkable results to be attained by steady self-suggestion. Mr. Kane's collar was awry and his coat dusty, almost as dusty as the drunkard's, with whom he had evidently had to grapple in raising him from the highway; and Helen, as she paused at the turning of the road which brought her upon them, heard Franklin's words:

'I've tried it myself for insomnia. I'm a nervous man, and I was in a bad way at the time; over-pressure, you know, and worry. I guess it's like that with you, too, isn't it? You get on edge. Well, there's nothing better than self-suggestion, and if you'll give it a try you'll be surprised by the results, I'm sure of it.'

Helen joined them and offered her assistance, for the bewildered proselyte seemed unable to move forward now that he was upon his feet.

'Well, if you would be so kind. Just your hand on his other shoulder, you know,' said Franklin, turning a grateful glance upon her. 'Our friend here is in trouble, you see. It's not far to the village, and what he wants is to get to bed, have a good sleep and then a wash. He'll feel a different man then.'

Helen, her hand at 'our friend's' left shoulder, helped to propel him forward, and ten minutes took them to his door, where, surrounded by a staring crowd of women and children, they delivered him into the keeping of his wife, a thin and weary person, who looked upon his benefactors with almost as much resentment as upon him.

'What he really needs, I'm afraid I think,' Helen said, as she and Mr. Kane walked away, 'is a good whipping.' She said it in order to see the effect of the ruthlessness upon her humanitarian companion.

Mr. Kane did not look shocked or grieved; he turned a cogitating glance upon her, and she saw that he diagnosed the state of mind that could make such a suggestion and could not take it seriously. He smiled, though a little gravely, in answering: 'Why, no, I don't think so; and I don't believe you think so, Miss Buchanan. What you want to give him is a hold on himself, hope, and self-respect; it wouldn't give you self-respect to be whipped, would it?'

'It might give me discretion,' said Helen, smiling back.

'We don't want human beings to have the discretion of animals; we want them to have the discretion of men,' said Franklin; 'that is, self-mastery and wisdom.'

Helen did not feel able to argue the point; indeed, it did not interest her; but she asked Mr. Kane, some days later, how his roadside friend was progressing towards the discretion of a man.

'Oh, he'll be all right,' said Franklin. 'He'll pull round. Self-suggestion will do it. It's not a bad case. He couldn't get hold of the idea at first—he's not very bright; but I found out that he'd got some very useful religious notions, and I work it in on these.'

From the housekeeper, a friend of her youth, Helen learned that in the village Mr. Kane's ministrations to Jim Betts were regarded with surprise, yet not without admiration. He was supposed to be some strange sort of foreign clergyman, not to be placed in any recognisable category. 'He's a very kind gentleman, I'm sure,' said Mrs. Fielding.

Mr. Kane was fond, Helen also observed, of entering into conversation with the servants. The butler's political views—which were guarded—he determinedly pursued, undeterred by Baines's cautious and deferential retreats. He considered the footman as a potential friend, whatever the footman might consider him. Their common manhood, in Franklin's eyes, entirely outweighed the slight, extraneous accidents of fortune—nay, these differences gave an additional interest. The footman had, no doubt, a point of view novel and valuable, if one could get at it. Franklin did not attempt to get at it by any method subversive of order or interfering with Thomas's duties; he observed all the conventions demanded by varying function. But Helen, strolling one morning before breakfast outside the dining-room windows, heard within and paused to listen to Mr. Kane's monotonous and slightly nasal tones as he shared the morning news with Thomas, who, with an air of bewildered if obedient attention, continued his avocations between the sideboard and the breakfast-table.

'Now I should say,' Franklin remarked, 'that something of that sort—Germany's doing wonders with it—could be worked here in England if you set yourselves to it.'

'Yes, sir,' said Thomas.

'Berlin has eliminated the slums, you know,' said Franklin, looking thoughtfully at Thomas over the top of the paper. 'What do you feel about it, all of you over here? It's a big question, you know, that of the housing of the poor.'

'Well, I can't say, sir,' said Thomas, compelled to a guarded opinion. 'Things do look black for the lower horders.'

'You're right, Thomas; and things will go on looking black for helpless people until they determine to help themselves, or until people who aren't helpless—like you and me—determine they shan't be so black.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Talk it over, you know. Get your friends interested in it. It's a mighty big subject, of course, that of the State and its poor, but it's wonderful what can be done by personal initiative.'

Helen entered at this point, and Thomas turned a furtive eye upon her, perhaps in appeal for protection against these unprovoked and inexplicable attacks. 'One might think the gentleman thought I had a vote and was canvassing me,' he said to Baines, condescending in this their common perplexity. And Baines replied: 'I'm sure I don't know what he's up to.'

Meanwhile Franklin, in the dining-room, folded his paper and said: 'You know, Miss Buchanan, that Thomas, though a nice fellow, is remarkably ignorant. I can't make out that there's anything of a civic or national nature that he's interested in. He doesn't seem to read anything in the papers except the racing and betting news. He doesn't seem to feel that he has any stake in this great country of yours, or any responsibility towards it. It makes me believe in manhood suffrage as I've never believed before. Our people may be politically corrupt, but at least they're interested; they're alive—alive enough to want to understand how to get the best of things—as they see best. I've rarely met an American that I couldn't get to talk; now it's almost impossible to get Thomas to talk. Yet he's a nice young fellow; he has a nice, open, intelligent face.'

'Oh yes, has he?' said Helen, who was looking over the envelopes at her place. 'I hadn't noticed his face; very pink, isn't it?'

'Yes, he has a healthy colour,' said Franklin, still meditating on Thomas's impenetrability. 'It's not that I don't perfectly understand his being uncommunicative when he's engaged in his work—it was rather tactless of me to talk to him just now, only the subject came up. I'd been talking to Baines about the Old Age Pensions yesterday. That's one of my objections to domestic service; it creates an artificial barrier between man and man; but I know that the barrier is part of the business, while the business is going on, and I've no quarrel with social convention, as such. But even when they are alone with me—and I'm referring to Baines now as much as to Thomas—they are very uncommunicative. I met Thomas on the road to the village the other day and could hardly get a word out of him till I began to talk about cricket and ask him about it.'

'He is probably a stupid boy,' said Helen, 'and you frighten him.'

'If you say that, it's an indictment on the whole system, you know,' said Franklin very gravely.

'What system?' Helen asked, opening her letters, but looking at Mr. Kane.

'The system that makes some people afraid of others,' said Franklin.

'It will always frighten inferior people to be talked to by their superiors as if they were on a level. You probably talk to Thomas about things he doesn't understand, and it bewilders him.' Helen, willing to enlighten his idealism, smiled mildly at him, glancing down at her letters as she spoke.

Mr. Kane surveyed her with his bright, steady gaze. Her simple elucidation evidently left him far from satisfied, either with her or the system. 'In essentials, Miss Buchanan,' he said, 'in the power of effort, endurance, devotion, I've no doubt that Thomas and I are equals, and that's all that ought to matter.'

The others now were coming in, and Helen only shook her head, smiling on and quite unconvinced as she said, taking her chair, and reaching out her hand to shake Althea's, 'I'm afraid the inessentials matter most, then, in human intercourse.'

From these fortuitous encounters Helen gathered the impression by degrees that though Mr. Kane might not find her satisfactory, he found her, in her incommunicativeness, quite as interesting as Thomas the footman. He spent as much time in endeavouring to probe her as he did in endeavouring to probe Baines, even more time. He would sit beside her garden-chair looking over scientific papers, making a remark now and then on their contents—contents as remote from Helen's comprehension as was the housing of the Berlin poor from Thomas's; and sometimes he would ask her a searching question, over the often frivolous answer to which he would carefully reflect.

'I gather, Miss Buchanan,' he said to her one afternoon, when they were thus together under the trees, 'I gather that the state of your health isn't good. Would it be inadmissible on my part to ask you if there is anything really serious the matter with you?'

'My state of health?' said Helen, startled. 'My health is perfectly good. Who told you it wasn't?'

'Why, nobody. But since you've been here—that's a fortnight now—I've observed that you've led an invalid's life.'

'I am lazy, that's all; and I'm in rather a bad temper,' Helen smiled; 'and it's very warm weather.'

'Well, when you're not lazy; when you're not in a bad temper; when it's cold weather—what do you do with yourself, anyway?' Franklin, now that he had fairly come to his point, folded his papers, clasped his hands around his knees and looked expectantly at her.

Helen returned his gaze for some moments in silence; then she found that she was quite willing to give Mr. Kane all he asked for—a detached sincerity. 'I can't say that I do anything,' she replied.

'Haven't you any occupation?'

'Not unless staying about with people is an occupation,' Helen suggested. 'I'm rather good at that—when I'm not too lazy and not too out of temper.'

'You don't consider society an occupation. It's only justifiable as a recreation when work's done. Every one ought to have an occupation. You're not alive at all unless you've a purpose that's organising your life in some way. Now, it strikes me,' said Franklin, eyeing her steadily, 'that you're hardly half alive.'

'Oh, dear!' Helen laughed. 'Why, pray?'

'Don't laugh at it, Miss Buchanan. It's a serious matter; the most serious matter there is. No, don't laugh; you distress me.'

'I beg your pardon,' said Helen, and she turned her head aside a little, for the laugh was not quite genuine, and she was suddenly afraid of those idiotic tears. 'Only it amuses me that any one should think me a serious matter.'

'Don't be cynical, Miss Buchanan; that's what's the trouble with you; you take refuge in cynicism rather than in thought. If you'd think about it and not try to evade it, you'd know perfectly well that there is nothing so serious to you in all the world as your own life.'

'I don't know,' said Helen, after a little pause, sobered, though still amused. 'I don't know that I feel anything very serious, except all the unpleasant things that happen, or the pleasant things that don't.'

'Well, what's more serious than suffering?' Mr. Kane inquired, and as she could really find no answer to this he went on: 'And you ought to go further; you ought to be able to take every human being seriously.'

'Do you do that?' Helen asked.

'Any one who thinks must do it; it's all a question of thinking things out. Now I've thought a good deal about you, Miss Buchanan,' Franklin continued, 'and I take you very seriously, very seriously indeed. I feel that you are very much above the average in capacity. You have a great deal in you; a great deal of power. I've been watching you very carefully, and I've come to the conclusion that you are a woman of power. That's why I take it upon myself to talk to you like this; that's why it distresses me to see you going to waste—half alive.'

Helen, her head still turned aside in her chair, looked up at the green branches above her, no longer even pretending to smile. Mr. Kane at once startled and steadied her. He made her feel vaguely ashamed of herself, and he made her feel sorry for herself, too, so that, funny as he was, his effect upon her was to soften and to calm her. Her temper felt less bad and her nerves less on edge.

'You are very kind,' she said, after a little while. 'It is very good of you to have thought about me like that. And you do think, at all events, that I am half alive. You think I have wants, even if I have no purposes.'

'Yes, that's it. Wants, not purposes; though what they are I can't find out.'

She was willing to satisfy his curiosity. 'What I want is money.'

'Well, but what do you want to do with money?' Franklin inquired, receiving the sordid avowal without a blink.

'I really don't know,' said Helen; 'to use what you call my power, I suppose.'

'How would you use it? You haven't trained yourself for any use of it—except enjoyment—as far as I can see.'

'I think I could spend money well. I'd give the people I liked a good time.'

'You'd waste their time, and yours, you mean. Not that I object to the spending of money—if it's in the right way.'

'I think I could find the right way, if I had it.' She was speaking with quite the seriousness she had disowned. 'I hate injustice, and I hate ugliness. I think I could make things nicer if I had money.'

Franklin now was silent for some time, considering her narrowly, and since she had now looked down from the branches and back at him, their eyes met in a long encounter. 'Yes,' he said at length, 'you'd be all right—if only you weren't so wrong. If only you had a purpose—a purpose directed towards the just and the beautiful; if only instead of waiting for means to turn up, you'd created means yourself; if only you'd kept yourself disciplined and steady of aim by some sort of hard work, you'd be all right.'

Helen, extended in her chair, an embodiment of lovely aimlessness, kept her eyes fixed on him. 'But what work can I do?' she asked. She was well aware that Mr. Kane could have no practical suggestions for her case, yet she wanted to show him that she recognised it as a case, she wanted to show him that she was grateful, and she was curious besides to hear what he would suggest. 'What am I fit for? I couldn't earn a penny if I tried. I was never taught anything.'

But Mr. Kane was ready for her, as he had been ready for Jim Betts. 'It's not a question of earning that I mean,' he said, 'though it's a mighty good thing to measure yourself up against the world and find out just what your cash value is, but I'm not talking about that; it's the question of getting your faculties into some sort of working order that I'm up against. Why don't you study something systematically, something you can grind at? Biology, if you like, or political economy, or charity organisation. Begin at once. Master it.'

'Would Dante do, for a beginning?' Helen inquired, smiling rather wanly. 'I brought him down, with an Italian dictionary. Shall I master Dante?'

'I should feel more comfortable about you if it was political economy,' said Franklin, now smiling back. 'But begin with Dante, by all means. Personally I found his point of view depressing, but then I read him in a translation and never got even as far as the Purgatory. Be sure you get as far as the Paradise, Miss Buchanan, and with your dictionary.'

CHAPTER XIII.

Franklin had all his time free for sitting with Helen under the trees. Althea's self-reproach, her self-doubt and melancholy, had been effaced by the arrival of Gerald Digby, and, at that epoch of her life, did not return at all. She had no time for self-doubt or self-reproach, no time even for self-consciousness. Franklin had faded into the dimmest possible distance; she was only just aware that he was there and that Helen seemed, kindly, to let him talk a good deal to her. She could not think of Franklin, she could not think of herself, she could think of nobody but one person, for her whole being was absorbed in the thought of Gerald Digby and in the consciousness of the situation that his coming had created. From soft exhilaration she had passed to miserable depression, yet a depression far different from the stagnant melancholy of her former mood; this was a depression of frustrated feeling, not of lack of feeling, and it was accompanied by the recognition of the fact that she exceedingly disliked Lady Pickering and wished exceedingly that she would go away. And with it went a brooding sense of delight in Gerald's mere presence, a sense of delight in even the pain that his indifference inflicted upon her.

He charmed her unspeakably—his voice, his smile, his gestures—and she knew that she did not charm him in any way, and that Lady Pickering, in her very foolishness, did charm him, and the knowledge made her very grave and careful when she was with him. Delight and pain were hidden beneath this manner of careful gravity, but, as the excitement of Franklin's presence had at first done—and in how much greater degree—they subtly transformed her; made her look and speak and move with a different languor and gentleness.

Gerald himself was the first to feel a change, the first to become aware of an aroma of mystery. He had been indifferent indeed, though he had obeyed Helen and had tried not only to be very courteous but to be very nice as well. Now, finding Althea's grave eyes upon him when he sometimes yielded to Lady Pickering's allurements, finding them turned away with that look of austere mildness, he ceased to be so indifferent, he began to wonder how much the little Puritan disapproved and how much she really minded; he began to make surmises about the state of mind that could be so aloof, so gentle, and so inflexible.

He met Althea one afternoon in the garden and walked up and down with her while she filled her basket with roses. She was very gentle, and immeasurably distant. The sense of her withdrawal roused his masculine instinct of pursuit. How different she was from Frances Pickering! How charmingly different. Yes, in her elaborate little dress of embroidered lawn, with her elaborate garden hat pinned so neatly on her thick fair hair, she pleased him by the sense of contrast. There was charm in her lack of charm, attraction in her indifference. How impossible to imagine those grave eyes smiling an alluring smile—he was getting tired of alluring smiles—how impossible to imagine Miss Jakes flirting.

'It's very nice to see you here,' he said. 'I have so many nice memories about this old garden. You don't mind my cigarette?'

Althea said that she liked it.

'There is a beautiful spray, Miss Jakes. Let me reach it for you.'

'Oh, thank you so much.'

'You are fond of flowers?'

'Very fond.'

'Which are your favourites?'

'Lilies of the valley.' Althea spoke kindly, as she might have spoken to a rather importunate child; his questions, indeed, were not original.

Gerald tried to mend the tameness of the effect that he was making. 'Yes, only the florists have rather spoiled them, haven't they? My favourites are the wilder ones—honeysuckle, grass of Parnassus, bell-heather. Helen always makes me think of grass of Parnassus and bell-heather, she is so solitary and delicate and strong.' He wanted Althea to realise that his real appreciation was for types very different from Lady Pickering. She smiled kindly, as if pleased with his simile, and he went on. 'You are like pansies, white and purple pansies.'

It was then that Althea blushed. Gerald noticed it at once. Experienced flirt as he was he was quick to perceive such symptoms. And, suddenly, it occurred to him that perhaps the reason she disapproved so much was the wish—unknown to herself, poor little innocent—that some one would flirt a little with her. He felt quite sure that no one had ever flirted with Althea. Helen had told him of Mr. Kane's hopeless suit, and they had wandered in rather helpless conjecture about the outside of a case that didn't, from their experience of cases, seem to offer any possibilities of an inside. Gerald had indeed loudly laughed at the idea of Mr. Kane as a wooer and Helen had smiled, while assuring him that wooing wasn't the only test of worth. Gerald was rather inclined to think it was. He was quite sure, though, that however worthy Mr. Kane might be he had never made any one blush. He was quite sure that Mr. Kane was incapable of flirting, and it pleased him now to observe the sign of susceptibility in Althea. It was good for women, he felt sure, to be made to blush sometimes, and he promised himself that he would renew the experiment with Althea. All the same it must be very unemphatically done; there would be something singularly graceless in venturing too far with this nice pansy, for though she might, all unaware, want to be made to blush, she would never want it to be because of his light motives.

Meanwhile Althea was in dread lest he should see her discomposure and her bliss. He did not see further than her discomposure.

They rehearsed theatricals all the next day—he, Helen, Lady Pickering, and the girls—and Lady Pickering was very naughty. Gerald, more than once, had caught Althea's eye fixed, repudiating in its calm, upon her. It had been especially repudiating when Frances, at tea, had thrown a bun at him.

'Do you know, Miss Jakes,' he said to her after dinner, when, to Lady Pickering's discomfiture, as he saw, he joined Althea on her little sofa, 'do you know, I suspect you of being dreadfully bored by all of us. We behave like a lot of children, don't we?' He was thinking of the bun.

'Indeed! I think it charming to be able to behave like a child, if one feels like one,' said Althea, coldly and mildly.

'Don't you ever feel like one? Do you always behave like a gentle muse?'

'Do I seem to behave like a muse? How tiresome I must be,' smiled Althea.

'Not tiresome, rather impressive. It's like looking up suddenly from some nocturnal fête—all Japanese lanterns and fireworks—and seeing the moon gazing down serenely and unseeingly upon one; it startles and sobers one a little, you know.'

'I suppose you are sober sometimes,' said Althea, continuing to smile.

'Lord, yes!' Gerald laughed. 'Really and truly, Miss Jakes, I'm only playing at being a child, you know. I'm quite a serious person. I like to look at the moon.'

And again Althea blushed. She looked down, sitting straightly in the corner of their sofa and turning her fan slowly between her fingers, and, feeling the sense of gracelessness in this too easy success, Gerald went on in a graver tone. 'I wish you would let me be serious with you sometimes, Miss Jakes; you'd see I'd quite redeem myself in your eyes.'

'Redeem yourself? From what?'

'Oh! from all your impression of my frivolity and folly. I can talk about art and literature and the condition of the labouring classes as wisely as anybody, I assure you.'

He said it so prettily that Althea had to laugh. 'But what makes you think I can?' she asked, and, delighted with the happy result of his appeal, he said that Helen had told him all about her wisdoms.

He sounded these wisdoms next day when he asked her to walk with him to the village. He told her, as they walked, of the various projects for using his life to some advantage that he had used to make—projects for improved agricultural methods and the bettering of the conditions of life in the country. Althea had read a great deal of political economy. She had, indeed, ground at it and mastered it in the manner advised by Franklin to Helen. Gerald found her quiet comments and criticisms very illuminating, not only of his theme, but of his own comparative ignorance. 'But, Miss Jakes, how did you come to understand all this?' he ejaculated; and she said, laughing a little at the impression she had made, that she had only read, gone to a few courses of lectures, and had a master for one winter in Boston. Gerald looked at her with new interest. It impressed him that an unprofessional woman should take anything so seriously. 'Have you gone into other profound things like this?' he asked; and, still laughing, Althea said that she supposed she had.

Her sympathy for those old plans of his, based on such understanding, was really inspiring. 'Ah, if only I had the money,' he sighed.

'But you wouldn't care to live in the country?' said Althea.

'There's nowhere else I really care to live. Nothing would please me so much as to spend the rest of my life at Merriston, dabbling at my painting and going in seriously for farming.'

'Why don't you do it?'

'Why, money! I've got no money. It's expensive work to educate oneself by experience, and I'm ignorant. You show me how ignorant. No; I'm afraid I'm to go on drifting, and never lead the life I best like.'

Althea was silent. She hardly knew what she was feeling, but it pressed upon her so, that she was afraid lest a breath would stir some consciousness in him. She had money, a good deal. What a pity that he had none.

'Now you,' Gerald went on, 'have all sorts of big, wise plans for life, I've no doubt. It would interest me to hear about them.'

'No; I drift too,' said Althea.

'You can't call it drifting when you read and study such a lot.'

'Oh yes, I can, when there is no real aim in the work. You should hear Mr. Kane scold me about that.'

Gerald was not interested in Mr. Kane. 'I should think, after all you've done, you might rest on your oars for a bit,' he remarked. 'It's quite enough, I should think, for a woman to know so much. If you liked to do anything, you'd do it awfully well, I'm sure.'

Ah, what would she not like to do! Help you to steer to any port you wanted was the half-articulate cry of her heart.

'She really is an interesting little person, your Althea,' Gerald said to Helen. 'You were wrong not to find her interesting. She is so wise and calm and she knows such a lot.'

'I'm too ignorant to be interested in knowledge,' said Helen.

'It's not mere knowledge, it's the gentle temperateness and independence one feels in her.'

Helen, somehow, did not feel them, or, at all events, felt other things too much to feel them preeminently. It was part of her unselfconsciousness not to guess why Althea's relation to her had slightly changed. She could hardly have followed with comprehension the suffering instability of her friend's character, nor dream that her own power over her was so great, yet so resented; but something in their talk about Mr. Kane had made Helen uncomfortable, and she said no more now, not wishing to emphasise any negative aspect of her attitude to Althea at a time when their relation seemed to have become a little strained. And she was pleased that Gerald should talk about political economy with Althea—it was so much better than flirting with Frances Pickering.

No one, indeed, unless it were Franklin Kane, gave much conjecture to Gerald's talks with his hostess. Lady Pickering noticed; but she was vexed, rather than jealous. She couldn't imagine that Gerald felt anything but a purely intellectual interest in such talks. It was rather as if a worshipper in some highly ritualistic shrine, filled with appeals to sight and hearing, had unaccountably wandered off into a wayside chapel. Lady Pickering felt convinced that this was mere vagrant curiosity on Gerald's part. She felt convinced that he couldn't care for chapels. She was so convinced that, moved to emphatic measures, she came into the open as it were, marched processions and waved banners before him, in order to remind him what the veritable church was for a person of taste. Sometimes Gerald joined her, but sometimes he waved a friendly greeting and went into the chapel again.

So it was that Althea suddenly found herself involved in that mute and sinister warfare—an unavowed contest with another woman for possession of a man. How it could be a real contest she did not know; she felt sure that Lady Pickering did not love Gerald Digby, that she herself loved him she had not yet told herself, and that he loved neither of them was obvious. It seemed a mere struggle for supremacy, in which Lady Pickering's role was active and her own passive. For when she saw that Lady Pickering looked upon Gerald as a prey between them, that she seized, threatened and allured, she herself, full of a proud disdain, drew away, relinquished any hold, any faintest claim she had, handed Gerald over, as it were, to his pursuer; and as she did this, coldly, gravely, proudly, she was not aware that no tactics could have been more effective. For Gerald, when he found himself pursued, and then dropped by Althea at the feet of the pursuer, became more and more averse to being seized. And what had been a gracefully amorous dialogue with Lady Pickering, became a slightly malicious discussion. 'Well, what do you want of me?' he seemed to demand of her, under all his grace. Lady Pickering did not want anything except to keep him, and to show Althea that she kept him. And she was willing to go to great lengths if this might be effected.

Gerald and Althea, walking one afternoon in the little wood that lay at the foot of the lawn, came upon Lady Pickering seated romantically upon a stone, her head in her hands. She said, looking up at them, with pathetic eyes of suffering, that she had wrenched her ankle and was in agony. 'I think it is sprained, perhaps broken,' she said.

Now both Althea and Gerald felt convinced that she was not in agony, and had perhaps not hurt her ankle at all. They were both a little embarrassed and a little ashamed for her.

'Take my arm, take Miss Jakes's,' said Gerald. 'We will help you back to the house.'

'Oh no. I must sit still for a little while,' said Lady Pickering.' I couldn't bear to stir yet. It must be only a wrench; yes, there, I can feel that it is a bad wrench. It's only that the pain has been so horrible, and I feel a little faint. Please sit down here for a moment, Gerald, beside me, and console me for my sufferings.'

It was really very shameless. Without a word Althea walked away.

'Miss Jakes—we'll—I'll follow in a moment,' Gerald called after her, while, irritated and at a loss, he stood over Lady Pickering. 'Have you really hurt it?' was his first inquiry, as Althea disappeared.

'Why does she go?' Lady Pickering inquired. 'I didn't mean that she was to go. Stiff, guindée little person. One would really think that she was jealous of me.'

'No, I don't think that one would think that at all,' Gerald returned.

Lady Pickering was pushed beyond the bounds of calculation, and when quite sincere she was really charming. 'O Gerald,' she said, looking up at him and full of roguish contrition, 'how unkind you are! And how horribly clear sighted. It's I who am jealous! Yes, I really am. I can't bear being neglected.'

'I don't see why you should,' said Gerald laughing, 'and I certainly shouldn't show such bad taste as to neglect you. So that it is jealousy, pure and simple. Is your ankle in the least hurt?'

'Really, I don't know. I did tumble a little, and then I saw you coming, and felt that I wanted to be talked to, that it was my turn.'

'What an absurd woman you are.'

'But do say that you like absurd women better than solemn ones.'

'I shall say nothing of the sort. Sometimes absurdity is delightful, and sometimes solemnity—not that I find Miss Jakes in the least solemn. It would do you a world of good to let her inform your mind a little.'

'Oh, please, I don't want to be informed, it might make my back look like that. My foot really is a little hurt, you know. Is it swollen?'

Gerald looked down, laughing, but very unsympathetic, at the perilous heel and pinched, distorted toe. 'Really, I can't say.'

'Do sit down, there is plenty of room, and tell me you aren't cross with me.'

'I'm not at all cross with you, but I'm not going to sit down beside you,' said Gerald. 'I'm going to take you and your ankle back to the house and then find Miss Jakes and go on talking.'

'You may make me cross,' said Lady Pickering, rising and leaning her arm on his.

'I don't believe I shall. You really respect me for my strength of character.'

'Wily creature!'

'Foolish child!' They were standing in the path, laughing at each other, far from displeased with each other, and it was fortunate that neither of them perceived among the trees Althea, passing again at a little distance, and glancing round irrepressibly to see if Gerald had indeed followed her; even Lady Pickering might have been slightly discomposed, for when Gerald said 'Foolish child!' he completed the part expected of him by lightly stooping his head and kissing her.

He then took Lady Pickering back to the house, established her in a hammock, and set off to find Althea. He knew that he had kept her waiting—if she had indeed waited. And he knew that he really was a little cross with Frances Pickering; he didn't care to carry flirtation as far as kissing.

Althea, however, was nowhere to be found. He looked in the house, heard that she had been there but had gone out again; he looked in the garden; he finally went back to the woods, an uncomfortable surmise rising; and finding her nowhere there, he strolled on into the meadows. Then, suddenly, he saw her, sitting on a rustic bench at a bend of the little brook. Her eyes were bent upon the running water, and she did not look up as he approached her. When he was beside her, her eyes met his, reluctantly and resentfully, and he was startled to observe that she had wept. His surmise returned. She must have seen him kiss Frances. Yet even then Gerald did not know why it should make Miss Jakes weep that he should behave like a donkey.

'May I sit down here?' he asked, genuinely grieved and genuinely anxious to find out what the matter was.

'Certainly,' said Althea in chilly tones.

He was a little confused. It had something to do with the kissing, he felt sure. 'Miss Jakes, I'm afraid you'll never believe me a serious person,' he said.

'Why should you be serious?' said Althea.

'You are angry with me,' Gerald remarked dismally.

'Why should I be angry?'

He raised his eyebrows, detached a bit of loosened wood from the seat, and skipped it over the water. 'Well, to find me behaving like a child again.'

'I should reserve my anger for more important matters,' said Althea. She was angry, or she hoped she was, for, far more than anger, it was misery and a passion of shame that surged in her. She knew now, and she could not hide from herself that she knew; and yet he cared so little that he had not even kept his promise; so little that he had stayed behind to kiss that most indecorous woman. If only she could make him think that it was only anger.

'Ah, but you are angry, and rather unjustly,' said Gerald. His eyes were seeking hers, rallying, pleading, perhaps laughing a little at her. 'And really, you know, you are a little unkind; I thought we were friends—what?'

She forced herself to meet those charming eyes, and then to smile back at him. It would have been absurd not to smile, but the effort was disastrous; her lips quivered; the tears ran down her cheeks. She rose, trembling and aghast. 'I am very foolish. I have such a headache. Please don't pay any attention to me—it's the heat, I think.'

She turned blindly towards the house.

The pretence of the headache was, he knew it in the flash of revelation that came to him, on a par with Frances's ankle—but with what a difference in motive! Grave, a little pale, Gerald walked silently beside her to the woods. He did not know what to say. He was a little frightened and a great deal touched.

'Mr. Digby,' Althea said, when they were among the trees again—and it hurt him to see the courage of her smile—'you must forgive me for being so silly. It is the heat, you know; and this headache—it puts one so on edge. I didn't mean to speak as I did. Of course I'm not angry.'

He was ready to help her out with the most radiant tact. 'Of course I knew it couldn't make any real difference to you—the way I behaved. Only I don't like you to be even a little cross with me.'

'I'm not—not even a little,' she said.

'We are friends then, really friends?'

His smile sustained and reassured her. Surely he had not seen—if he could smile like that—ever so lightly, so merrily, and so gravely too. Courage came back to her. She could find a smile as light as his in replying: 'Really friends.'

CHAPTER XIV.

Gerald, after Althea had gone in, walked for some time in the garden, taking counsel with himself. The expression of his face was still half touched and half alarmed. He smoked two cigarettes and then came to the conclusion that, until he could have a talk with Helen, there was no conclusion to be come to. He never came to important conclusions unaided. He would sleep on it and then have a talk with Helen.

He sought her out next morning on the first opportunity. She was in the library writing letters. She looked, as was usual with her at early morning hours, odd to the verge of ugliness. It always took her some time to recover from the drowsy influences of the night. She was dimmed, as it were, with eyelids half awake, and small lips pouting, and she seemed at once more childlike and more worn than later in the day. Gerald looked at her with satisfaction. To his observant and appreciative eye, Helen was often at her most charming when at her ugliest.

'I've something to talk over,' he said. 'Can you give me half an hour or so?'

She answered, 'Certainly,' laying down her pen, and leaning back in her chair.

'Your letters aren't important? I may keep you for a longish time. Perhaps we might put it off till the afternoon?'

'They aren't in the least important. You may keep me as long as you like.'

'Thanks. Have a cigarette?' He offered his case, and Helen took one and lighted it at the match he held for her, and then Gerald, lighting his own, proceeded to stroll up and down the room reflecting.

'Helen,' he began, 'I've been thinking things over.' His tone was serene, yet a little inquiring. He might have been thinking over some rather uncertain investment, or the planning of a rather exacting trip abroad. Yet Helen's intuition leaped at once to deeper significances. Looking out of the window at the lawn, bleached with dew, the trees, the distant autumnal uplands, while she quietly smoked her cigarette, it was as if her sub-consciousness, aroused and vigilant, held its breath, waiting.

'You know,' said Gerald, 'what I've always really wanted to do more than anything else. As I get older, I want it more and more, and get more and more tired of my shambling sort of existence. I love this old place and I love the country. I'd like nothing so much as to be able to live here, try my hand at farming, paint a little, read a little, and get as much hunting as I could.'

Helen, blowing a ring of smoke and watching it softly hover, made no comment on these prefatory remarks.

'Well, as you know,' said Gerald, 'to do that needs money; and I've none. And you know that the only solution we could ever find was that I should marry money. And you know that I never found a woman with money whom I liked well enough.' He was not looking at Helen as he said this; his eyes were on the shabby old carpet that he was pacing. And in the pause that followed Helen did not speak. She knew—it was all that she had time to know—that her silence was expectant only, not ominous. Consciousness, now, as well as sub-consciousness, seemed rushing to the bolts and bars and windows of the little lodge of friendship, making it secure—if still it might be made secure—against the storm that gathered. She could not even wonder who Gerald had found. She had only time for the dreadful task of defence, so that no blast of reality should rush in upon them.

'Well,' said Gerald, and it was now with a little more inquiry and with less serenity, 'I think, perhaps, I've found her. I think, Helen, that your nice Althea cares about me, you know, and would have me.'

Helen sat still, and did not move her eyes from the sky and trees. There was a long white cloud in the sky, an island floating in a sea of blue. She noted its bays and peninsulas, the azure rivers that interlaced it, its soft depressions and radiant uplands. She never forgot it. She could have drawn the snowy island, from memory, for years. All her life long she had waited for this moment; all her life long she had lived with the sword of its acceptance in her heart. She had thought that she had accepted; but now the sword turned—horribly turned—round and round in her heart, and she did not know what she should do.

'Well,' Gerald repeated, standing still, and, as she knew, looking at the back of her head in a little perplexity.

Helen looked cautiously down at the cigarette she held; it still smoked languidly. She raised it to her lips and drew a whiff. Then, after that, she dared a further effort. 'Well?' she repeated.

Gerald laughed a trifle nervously. 'I asked you,' he reminded her.

She was able, testing her strength, as a tight-rope walker slides a careful foot along the rope, to go on. 'Oh, I see. And do you care about her?'

Gerald was silent for another moment, and she guessed that he had run his hand through his hair and rumpled it on end.

'She really is a little dear, isn't she?' he then said. 'You mayn't find her interesting—though I really do; and she may be like eau rougie; but, as you said, it's a pleasant draught to have beside one. She is gentle and wise and good, and she seems to take her place here very sweetly, doesn't she? She seems really to belong here, don't you think so?'

Helen could not answer that question. 'Do you want me to tell you whether you care for her?' she asked.

He laughed. 'I suppose I do.'

'And, on the whole, you hope I'll tell you that you do.'

'Well, yes,' he assented.

The dreadful steeling of her will at the very verge of swooning abysses gave an edge to her voice. She tried to dull it, to speak very quietly and mildly, as she said: 'I must have all the facts of the case before me, then. I confess I hadn't suspected it was a case.'

'Which means that you'd never dreamed I could fall in love with Miss Jakes.' Gerald's tone was a little rueful.

'Oh—you have fallen in love with her?'

'Why, that's just what I'm asking you!' he laughed again. 'Or, at least, not that exactly, for of course it's not a question of being in love. But I think her wise and good and gentle, and she cares for me—I think; and it seems almost like the finger of destiny—finding her here. Have you any idea how much money she has? It must be quite a lot,' said Gerald.

Helen was ready with her facts. 'A very safe three thousand a year, I believe. Not much, of course, but quite enough for what you want to do. But,' she added, after the pause in which he reflected on this sum—it was a good deal less than he had taken for granted—'I don't think that Althea would marry you on that basis. She is very proud and very romantic. If you want her to marry you, you will have to make her feel that you care for her in herself.' It was her own pride that now steadied her pulses and steeled her nerves. She would be as fair to Gerald's case as though he were her brother; she would be too fair, perhaps. Here was the pitfall of her pride that she did not clearly see. Perhaps it was with a grim touch of retribution that she promised herself that since he could think of Althea Jakes, he most certainly should have her.

'Yes, she is proud,' said Gerald. 'That's one of the things one so likes in her. She'd never hold out a finger, however much she cared.'

'You will have to hold out both hands,' said Helen.

'You think she won't have me unless I can pretend to be in love with her? I'm afraid I can't take that on.'

'I'm glad you can't. She is too good for such usage. No,' said Helen, holding her scales steadily, 'perfect frankness is the only way. If she knows that you really care for her—even if you are not romantic—if you can make her feel that the money—though a necessity—is secondary, and wouldn't have counted at all unless you had come to care, I should say that your chances are good—since you have reason to believe that she has fallen in love with you.'

'It's not as if I denied her anything I had to give, is it?' Gerald pondered on the point of conscience she put before him.

'You mean that you're incapable of caring more for any woman than for Althea?'

'Of course not. I care a great deal more for you,' said Gerald, again rather rueful under her probes. 'I only mean that I'm not likely to fall in love again, or anything of that sort. She can be quite secure about me. I'll be her devoted and faithful husband.'

'I think you care,' said Helen. 'I think you can make her happy.'

But Gerald now came and sat on the corner of the writing-table beside her, facing her, his back to the window. 'It's a tremendous thing to decide on, isn't it, Helen?'

She turned her eyes on him, and he looked at her with a gaze troubled and a little groping, as though he sought in her further elucidations; as though, for the first time, she had disappointed him a little.

'Is it?' she asked. 'Is marriage really a tremendous thing?'

'Well, isn't it?'

'I'm not sure. In one way, of course, it is. But people, perhaps, exaggerate the influence of their own choice on the results. You can't be sure of results, choose as carefully as you will; it's what comes after that decides them, I imagine—the devotion, the fidelity you speak of. And since you've found some one to whom you can promise those, some one wise and good and gentle, isn't that all that you need be sure of?'

Gerald continued to study her face. 'You're not pleased, Helen,' he now said. It was a curious form of torture that Helen must smile under.

'Well, it's not a case for enthusiasm, is it?' she said. 'I'm certainly not displeased.'

'You'd rather I married her than Frances Pickering?'

'Would Frances have you, too, irresistible one?'

'Oh, I don't think so; pretty sure not. She would want a lot of things I can't give. I was only wondering which you'd prefer.'

Helen heard the clamour of her own heart. Frances! Frances! She is trivial; she will not take your place: she will not count in his life at all. Althea will count; she will count more and more. She will be his habit, his haus-frau, the mother of his children. He is not in love with her; but he will come to love her, and there will be no place for friendship in his life. Hearing that clamour she dragged herself together, hating herself for having heard it, and answered: 'Althea, of course; she is worth three of Frances.'

Gerald gave a little sigh. 'Well, I'm glad we agree there,' he said. 'I'm glad you see that Althea is worth three of her. What I do wish is that you cared more about Althea.'

What he was telling her was that if she would care more about Althea, he would too, and she wondered if this, also, were a part of pride; should she help him to care more for Althea? A better pride sustained her; she felt the danger in these subtleties of her torment. 'I like Althea,' she said. 'I, too, think that she is wise and good and gentle. I think that she will be the best of wives, the best of wives and mothers. But, as I said, I don't feel enthusiasm; I don't feel it a case for enthusiasm.'

'Of course it's not a case for enthusiasm,' said Gerald, who was evidently eager to range himself completely with her. 'I'm fond, and I'll grow fonder; and I believe you will too. Don't you, Helen?'

'No doubt I shall,' said Helen. She got up now and tossed her cigarette into the waste-paper basket, and stood for a moment looking past Gerald's head at the snowy island, now half dissolved in blue, as though its rivers had engulfed it. They were parting, he and she, she knew it, and yet there was no word that she could say to him, no warning or appeal that she could utter. If he could see that it was the end he would, she knew, start back from his shallow project. But he did not know that it was the end and he might never know. Did he not really understand that an adoring wife could not be fitted into their friendship? His innocent unconsciousness of inevitable change made Helen's heart, in its deeper knowledge of human character, sink to a bitterness that felt like a hatred of him, and she wondered, looking forward, whether Gerald would ever miss anything, or ever know that anything was gone.

Gerald sat still looking up at her as though expecting some further suggestion, and as her eyes came back to him, she smiled to him with deliberate sweetness, showing him thus that her conclusions were all friendly. And he rose, smiling back, reassured and fortified. 'Well,' he said, 'since you approve, I suppose it's settled. I shan't ask her at once, you know. She might think it was because of what I'd guessed. I'll lead up to it for a day or two. And, Helen, you might, if you've a chance, put in a good word for me.'

'I will, if I've a chance,' said Helen.

Gerald, as if aware that he had taken up really too much of her time, now moved towards the door. But he went slowly, and at the door he paused. He turned to her smiling. 'And you give me your blessing?' he asked.

He was most endearing when he smiled so. It was a smile like a child's, that caressed and cajoled, and that saw through its own cajolery and pleaded, with a little wistfulness, that there was more than could show itself, behind. Helen knew what was behind—the sense of strangeness, the affection and the touch of fear. She had never refused that smile anything; she seemed to refuse it nothing now, as she answered with a maternal acquiescence, 'I give you my blessing, dear Gerald.'

CHAPTER XV.

It was still early. When he had left her, Helen looked at her watch; only half-past ten. She stood thinking. Should she go out, as usual, take her place in a long chair under the limes, close her eyes and pretend to sleep? No, she could not do that. Should she sit down in her room with Dante and a dictionary? No, that she would not do. Should she walk far away into the woods and lie upon the ground and weep? That would be a singularly foolish plan, and at lunch everybody would see that she had been crying. Yet it was impossible to remain here, to remain still, and thinking. She must move quickly, and make her body tired. She went to her room, pinned on her hat, drew on her gloves, and, choosing a stick as she went through the hall, passed from the grounds and through the meadow walk to a long road, climbing and winding, whose walls, at either side, seemed to hold back the billows of the woodland. The day was hot and dusty. The sky was like a blue stone, the green monotonous, the road glared white. Helen, with the superficial fretfulness of an agony controlled, said to herself that nothing more like a bad water-colour landscape could be imagined; there were the unskilful blots of heavy foliage, the sleekly painted sky, and the sunny road was like the whiteness of the paper, picked out, for shadows, in niggling cobalt. A stupid, bland, heartless day.

She walked along this road for several miles and left it to cross a crisp, grassy slope from where, standing still and turning to see, she looked down over all the country and saw, far away, the roofs of Merriston House. She stood for a long time looking down at it, the hot wind ruffling her skirts and hair. It was a heartless day and she herself felt heartless. She felt herself as something silent, swift, and raging. For now she was to taste to the full the bitter difference between the finality of personal decision and a finality imposed, fatefully and irrevocably, from without. She had thought herself prepared for this ending of hope. She had even, imagining herself hardened and indifferent, gone in advance of it and had sought to put the past under her feet and to build up a new life. But she had not been prepared; that she now knew. The imagination of the fact was not its realisation in her very blood and bones, nor the standing ready, armed for the blow, this feel of the blade between her ribs. And looking down at the only home she had ever had, in moments long, sharp, dream-like, her strength was drained from her as if by a fever, and she felt that she was changed all through and that each atom of her being was set, as it were, a little differently, making of her a new personality, through this shock of sudden hopelessness.

She felt her knees weak beneath her and she moved on slowly, away from the sun, to a lonely little wood that bordered the hill-top. In her sudden weakness she climbed the paling that enclosed it with some difficulty, wondering if she were most inconveniently going to faint, and walking blindly along a narrow path, in the sudden cool and darkness, she dropped down on the moss at the first turning of the way.

Here, at last, was beauty. The light, among the fanlike branches, looked like sea-water streaked with gold; the tall boles of the beeches were like the pillars of a temple sunken in the sea. Helen lay back, folded her arms behind her head, and stared up at the chinks of far brightness in the green roof overhead. It was like being drowned, deep beneath the surface of things. If only she could be at peace, like a drowned thing. Lying there, she longed to die, to dissolve away into the moss, the earth, the cool, green air. And feeling this, in the sudden beauty, tears, for the first time, came to her eyes. She turned over on her face, burying it in her arms and muttering in childish language, 'I'm sick of it; sick to death of it.'

As she spoke she was aware that some one was near her. A sudden footfall, a sudden pause, followed her words. She lifted her head, then she sat up. The tears had flowed and her cheeks were wet with them, but of that she was not conscious, so great was her surprise at finding Franklin Winslow Kane standing before her on the mossy path.

Mr. Kane carried his straw hat in his hand. He was very warm, his hair was untidy on his moist brow, his boots were white with dust, his trousers were turned up from them and displayed an inch or so of thin ankle encased in oatmeal-coloured socks. His tie—Helen noted the one salient detail among the many dull ones that made up a whole so incongruous with the magic scene—was of a peculiarly harsh and ugly shade of blue. He had only just climbed over a low wall near by and that was why he had come upon her so inaudibly and had, so inadvertently, been a witness of her grief.

He did not, however, show embarrassment, but looked at her with the hesitant yet sympathetic attentiveness of a vagrant dog.

Helen sat on the moss, her feet extended before her, and she returned his look from her tearful eyes, making no attempt to soften the oddity of the situation. She found, indeed, a gloomy amusement in it, and was aware of wondering what Mr. Kane, who made so much of everything, would make of their mutual predicament.

'Have you been having a long walk, too?' she asked.

He looked at her, smiling now a little, as if he wagged a responsive tail; but he was not an ingratiating dog, only a friendly and a troubled one.

'Yes, I have,' he said. 'We have got rather a long way off, Miss Buchanan.'

'That's a comfort sometimes, isn't it,' said Helen. She took out her handkerchief and dried her eyes, drawing herself, then, into a more comfortable position against the trunk of a beech-tree.

'You'd rather I went away, wouldn't you,' said Mr. Kane; 'but let me say first that I'm very sorry to have intruded, and very sorry indeed to see that you're unhappy.'

She now felt that she did not want him to go, indeed she felt that she would rather he stayed. After the loneliness of her despair, she liked the presence of the friendly, wandering dog. It would be comforting to have it sit down beside you and to have it thud its tail when you chanced to look at it. Mr. Kane would not intrude, he would be a consolation.

'No, don't go,' she said. 'Do sit down and rest. It's frightfully hot, isn't it.'

He sat down in front of her, clasping his knees about, as was his wont, and exposing thereby not only the entire oatmeal sock, but a section of leg nearly matching it in tint.

'Well, I am rather tired,' he said. 'I've lost my way, I guess.' And, looking about him, he went on: 'Very peaceful things aren't they, the woods. Trees are very peaceful things, pacifying things, I mean.'

Helen looked up at them. 'Yes, they are peaceful. I don't know that I find them pacifying.'

His eyes came back to her and he considered her again for a moment before he said, smiling gently, 'I've been crying too.'

In the little pause that followed this announcement they continued to look at each other, and it was not so much that their eyes sounded the other's eyes as that they deepened for each other and, without effort or surprise, granted to each other the quiet avowal of complete sincerity.

'I'm very sorry that you are unhappy, too,' said Helen. She noticed now that his eyes were jaded and that all his clear, terse little face was softened and relaxed.

'Yes, I'm unhappy,' said Franklin. 'It's queer, isn't it, that we should find each other like this. I'm glad I've found you: two unhappy people are better together, I think, than alone. It eases things a little, don't you think so?'

'Perhaps it does,' said Helen. 'That is, it does if one of them is so kind and so pacifying as you are; you do remind me of the trees,' she smiled.

'Ah, well, that's very sweet of you, very sweet indeed,' said Franklin, looking about him at the limpid green. 'It makes me feel I'm not intruding, to have you say that to me. It didn't follow, of course, because I'm glad to find you that you would be glad I'd come. You don't show it much, Miss Buchanan'—he was looking at her again—'your crying.'

'I'm always afraid that I show it dreadfully. That's the worst of it, I don't dare indulge in it often.'

'No, you don't show it much. You sometimes look as though you had been crying when I'm sure you haven't—early in the morning, for instance.'

Helen could but smile again. 'You are very observant. You really noticed that?'

'I don't know that I'm so very observant, Miss Buchanan, but I'm interested in everybody, and I'm particularly interested in you, so that of course I notice things like that. Now you aren't particularly interested in me—though you are so kind—are you?' and again Mr. Kane smiled his weary, gentle smile.

It seemed very natural to sit under peaceful trees and talk to Mr. Kane, and it was easy to be perfectly frank with him. Helen answered his smile. 'No, I'm not. I'm quite absorbed in my own affairs. I'm interested in hardly anybody. I'm very selfish.'

'Ah, you would find that you wouldn't suffer so—in just your way, I mean—if you were less selfish,' Franklin Kane remarked.

'What other way is there?' Helen asked. 'What is your way?'

'Well, I don't know that I've found a much better one, our ways seem to have brought us to pretty much the same place, haven't they,' he almost mused. 'That's the worst of suffering, it's pretty much alike, at all times and in all ways. I'm not unselfish either, you know, a mighty long way from it. But I'm not sick of it, you know, not sick to death of it. Forgive me if I offend in repeating your words.'

'You are unselfish, I'm sure of that,' said Helen. 'And so you must have other things to live for. My life is very narrow, and when things I care about are ruined I see nothing further.'

'Things are never ruined in life, Miss Buchanan. As long as there is life there is hope and action and love. As long as you can love you can't be sick to death of it.' Mr. Kane spoke in his deliberate, monotonous tones.

Helen was silent for a little while. She was wondering; not about Mr. Kane, nor about his suffering, nor about the oddity of thus talking with him about her own. It was no more odd to talk to him than if he had been the warm-hearted dog, dowered for her benefit with speech; she was wondering about what he said and about that love to which he alluded. 'Perhaps I don't know much about love,' she said, and more to herself than to Mr. Kane.

'I've inferred that since knowing you,' said Franklin.

'I mean, of course,' Helen defined, 'the selfless love you are talking of.'

'Yes, I understand,' said Franklin. 'Now, you see, the other sort of love, the sort that makes people go away and cry in the woods—for I've been crying because I'm hopelessly in love, Miss Buchanan, and I presume that you are too—well, that sort of love can't escape ruin sometimes. That side of life may go to pieces and then there's nothing left for it but to cry. But that side isn't all life, Miss Buchanan.'

Helen did not repudiate his interpretation of her grief. She was quite willing that Mr. Kane should know why she had been crying, but she did not care to talk about that side to him. It had been always, and it would always be, she feared, all life to her. She looked sombrely before her into the green vistas.

'Of course,' Franklin went on, 'I don't know anything about your hopeless love affair. I'm only sure that your tragedy is a noble one and that you are up to it, you know—as big as it is. If it's hopeless, it's not, I'm sure, because of anything in you. It's because of fate, or circumstance, or some unworthiness in the person you care for. Now with me one of the hardest things to bear is the fact that I've nothing to blame but myself. I'm not adequate, that's the trouble; no charm, you see,' Mr. Kane again almost mused, 'no charm. Charm is the great thing, and it means more than it seems to mean, all evolution, the survival of the fittest—natural selection—is in it, when you come to think of it. If I'd had charm, personality, or, well, greatness of some sort, I'd have probably won Althea long ago. You know, of course, that it's Althea I'm in love with, and have been for years and years. Well, there it is,' Franklin was picking tall blades of grass that grew in a little tuft near by and putting them neatly together as he spoke. 'There it is, but even with the pain of just that sort of failure to bear, I don't intend that my life shall be ruined. It can't be, by the loss of that hope. I'm not good enough for Althea. I've got to accept that; natural selection rejects me,' looking up from his grass blades he smiled gravely at his companion; 'but I'm good enough for other beautiful things that need serving. And I'm good enough to go on being Althea's friend, to be of some value to her in that capacity. So my life isn't ruined, not by a long way, and I wish you'd try to feel the same about yours.'

Helen didn't feel in the least inclined to try, but she found herself deeply interested in Mr. Kane's attitude; for the first time Mr. Kane had roused her intent interest. She looked hard at him while he sat there, demonstrating to her the justice of life's dealings with him and laying one blade of grass so accurately against another, and she was wondering now about him. It was not because she thought her own feelings sacred that she preferred them to be concealed, but she saw that Mr. Kane's were no less sacred to him for being thus unconcealed. She even guessed that his revelation of feeling was less for his personal relief than for her personal benefit; that he was carrying out, in all the depths of his sincerity, a wish to comfort her, to take her out of herself. Well, he had taken her out of herself, and after having heard that morning what Althea's significance could be in the life of another man, she was curious to find what her so different significance could be in the life of this one, as alien from Gerald in type and temperament as it was possible to imagine. Why did Althea mean anything at all to Gerald, and why did she mean everything to Mr. Kane? And through what intuition of the truth had Mr. Kane come to his present hopelessness?

'Do you think women always fall in love with the adequate man, and vice versa?' she asked, and her eyes were gentle as they mused on him. 'Why should you say that it's because you're not adequate that Althea isn't in love with you?'

Franklin fixed his eye upon her and it had now a new light, it deepened for other problems than Helen's and his own. 'Not adequate for her—not what she wants—that's my point,' he said. 'But there are other sorts of mistakes to make, of course. If Althea falls in love with a man equipped as I'm not equipped, that does prove that I lack something that would have won her; but it doesn't prove that she's found the right man. We've got beyond natural selection when it comes to life as a whole. He may be the man for her to fall in love with, but is he the man to make her happy? That's just the question for me, Miss Buchanan, and I wish you'd help me with it.'

'Help you?' Helen rather faltered.

'Yes, please try. You must see—I see it plainly enough—that Mr. Digby is going to marry Althea.' He actually didn't add, 'If she'll have him.' Helen wondered how far his perspicacity went; had he seen what Gerald had seen, and what she had not seen at all?

'You think it's Gerald who is in love with her?' she asked.

Again Franklin's eye was on her, and she now saw in it his deep perplexity. She couldn't bear to add to it. 'I've guessed nothing,' she said. 'You must enlighten me.'

'I wasn't sure at first,' said Franklin, groping his way. 'He seemed so devoted to Lady Pickering; but for some days it's been obvious, hasn't it, that that wasn't in the least serious?'

'Not in the least.'

'I couldn't have reconciled myself,' said Franklin, 'to the idea of a man, who could take Lady Pickering seriously, marrying Althea. I can't quite reconcile myself to the idea of a man who could, well, be so devoted to Lady Pickering, marrying Althea. He's your friend, I know, Miss Buchanan, as well as your relative, but you know what I feel for Althea, and you'll forgive my saying that if I'm not big enough for her he isn't big enough either; no, upon my soul, he isn't.'

Helen's eyes dwelt on him. She knew that, with all the forces of concealment at her command, she wanted to keep from Mr. Kane the blighting irony of her own inner comments; above everything, now, she dreaded lest her irony should touch one of Mr. Kane's ideals. It was so beautiful of him to think himself not big enough for Althea, that she was well content that he should see Gerald in the same category of unfitness. Perhaps Gerald was not big enough for Althea; Gerald's bigness didn't interest Helen; the great point for her was that Mr. Kane should not guess that she considered Althea not big enough for him. 'If Gerald is the lucky man,' she said, after the pause in which she gazed at him; 'if she cares enough for Gerald to marry him, then I think he will make her happy; and that's the chief thing, isn't it?'

Mr. Kane could not deny that it was, and yet, evidently, he was not satisfied. 'I believe you'll forgive me if I go on,' he said. 'You see it's so tremendously important to me, and what I'm going to say isn't really at all offensive—I mean, people of your world and Mr. Digby's world wouldn't find it so. I'll tell you the root of my trouble, Miss Buchanan. Your friend is a poor man, isn't he, and Althea is a fairly rich woman. Can you satisfy me on this point? I can give Althea up; I must give her up; but I can hardly bear it if I'm to give her up to a mere fortune-hunter, however happy he may be able to make her.'

Helen's cheeks had coloured slightly. 'Gerald isn't a mere fortune-hunter,' she said. 'People of my world do think fortune-hunting offensive.'

'Forgive me then,' said Franklin, gazing at her, contrite but unperturbed. 'I'm very ignorant of your world. May I put it a little differently. Would Mr. Digby be likely to fall in love with a woman if she hadn't a penny?'

She had quite forgiven him. She smiled a little in answering. 'He has often fallen in love with women without a penny, but he could hardly marry a woman who hadn't one.'

'He wouldn't wish to marry Althea, then, if she had no money?'

'However much he would wish it, I don't think he would be so foolish as to do it,' said Helen.

'Can't a man worth his salt work for the woman he loves?'

'A man well worth his salt may not be trained for making money,' Helen returned. She knew the question clamouring in his heart, the question he must not ask, nor she answer: 'Is he in love with Althea?' Mr. Kane could never accept nor understand what the qualified answer to such a question would have to be, and she must leave him with his worst perplexity unsolved. But one thing she could do for him, and she hoped that it might soften a little the bitterness of his uncertainty. The sunlight suddenly had failed, and a slight wind passed among the boughs overhead. Helen got upon her feet, straightening her hat and putting back her hair. It was time to be going homewards. They went down the path and climbed over the palings, and it was on the hill-top that Helen said, looking far ahead of her, far over the now visible roofs of Merriston:

'I've known Gerald Digby all my life, and I know Althea, now, quite well. And if Gerald is to be the lucky man I'd like to say, for him, you know—and I think it ought to set your mind at rest—that I think Althea will be quite as lucky as he will be, and that I think that he is worthy of her.'

Franklin kept his eyes on her as she spoke, and though she did not meet them, her far gaze, fixed ahead, seemed in its impersonal gravity to commune with him, for his consolation, more than an answering glance would have done. She was giving him her word for something, and the very fact that she kept it impersonal, held it there before them both, made it more weighty and more final. Franklin evidently found it so. He presently heaved a sigh in which relief was mingled with acceptance—acceptance of the fact that, from her, he must expect no further relief. And presently, as they came out upon the winding road, he said: 'Thanks, that's very helpful.'

They walked on then in silence. The sun was gone and the wind blew softly; the freshness of the coming rain was in the air. Helen lifted her face to them as the first slow drops began to fall. In her heart, too, the fierceness of her pain was overcast. Something infinitely sad, yet infinitely peaceful, stilled her pulses. Infinitely sad, yet infinitely funny too. How small, how insignificant, this tangle of the whole-hearted and the half-hearted; what did it all come to, and how feel suffering as tragic when farce grimaced so close beside it? Who could take it seriously when, in life, the whole-hearted were so deceived and based their loves on such illusion? To feel the irony was to acquiesce, perhaps, and acquiescence, even if only momentary, like the lull and softness in nature, was better than the beating fierceness of rebellion. Everything was over. And here beside her went the dear ungainly dog. She turned her head and smiled at him, the raindrops on her lashes.

'You don't mind the rain, Miss Buchanan?' said Franklin, who had looked anxiously at the weather, and probably felt himself responsible for not producing an umbrella for a lady's need.

'I like it.' She continued to smile at him.

'Miss Buchanan,' said Franklin, looking at her earnestly and not smiling back, 'I want to say something. I've seemed egotistic and I've been egotistic. I've talked only about my own troubles; but I don't believe you wanted to talk about yours, did you?' Helen, smiling, slightly shook her head. 'And at the same time you've not minded my knowing that you have troubles to bear.' Again she shook her head. 'Well, that's what I thought; that's all right, then. What I wanted to say was that if ever I can help you in any way—if ever I can be of any use—will you please remember that I'm your friend.'

Helen, still looking at him, said nothing for some moments. And now, once more, a slight colour rose in her cheeks. 'I can't imagine why you should be my friend,' she said. 'I feel that I know a great deal about you; but you know nothing about me, and please believe me when I say that there's very little to know.'

Already he knew her well enough to know that the slight colour, lingering on her cheek, meant that she was moved. 'Ah, I can't believe you there,' he said. 'And at all events, whatever there is to know, I'm its friend. You don't know yourself, you see. You only know what you feel, not at all what you are.'

'Isn't that what I am?' She looked away, disquieted by this analysis of her own personality.

'By no means all,' said Franklin. 'You've hardly looked at the you that can do things—the you that can think things.'

She didn't want to look at them, poor, inert, imprisoned creatures. She looked, instead, at the quaint, unexpected, and touching thing with which she was presented—Mr. Kane's friendship. She would have liked to have told him that she was grateful and that she, too, was his friend; but such verbal definitions as these were difficult and alien to her, as alien as discussion of her own character and its capacities. It seemed to be claiming too much to claim a capacity for friendship. She didn't know whether she was anybody's friend, really—as Mr. Kane would have counted friendship. She thought him dear, she thought him good, and yet she hardly wanted him, would hardly miss him if he were not there. He touched her, more deeply than she perhaps quite knew, and yet she seemed to have nothing for him. So she gave up any explicit declaration, only turning her eyes on him and smiling at him again through her rain-dimmed lashes, as they went down the winding road together.

CHAPTER XVI.

It was Althea who, during the next few days, while Gerald with the greatest tact and composure made his approaches, was most unconscious of what was approaching her. Everybody else now saw quite clearly what Gerald's intentions were. Althea was dazed; she did not know what the bright object that had come so overpoweringly into her life wanted of her. She had feared—sickeningly—with a stiffening of her whole nature to resistance, that he wanted to flirt with her as well as with Lady Pickering. Then she had seen that he wasn't going to flirt, that he was going to be her friend, and then—this in the two or three days that followed Gerald's talk with Helen—that he was going to be a dear one. She had only adjusted her mind to this grave joy and wondered, with all the perplexity of her own now recognised love, whether it could prove more than a very tremulous joy, when the final revelation came upon her. It came, and it was still unexpected, one afternoon when she and Gerald sat in the drawing-room together. It was very warm, and they had come into the cooler house after tea to look at a book that Gerald wanted to show her. It had proved to be not much of a book after all, and even while standing with him in the library, while he turned the musty leaves for her and pointed out the funny old illustrations he had been telling her of, Althea had felt that the book was only a pretext for getting her away to himself. He had led her back to the drawing-room and he had said, 'Don't let's go out again, it's much nicer here. Please sit here and talk to me.'

It was just the hour, just such an afternoon as that on which poor Franklin had arrived; Althea thought of that as she and Gerald sat down on the same little sofa where she and Franklin had sat. And, in a swift flash of association, she remembered that Franklin had wanted to kiss her, and had kissed her. They had left Franklin under the limes with Helen; he had been reading something to Helen out of a pamphlet, and Helen had looked, though rather sleepy, kindly acquiescent; but the memory of the past could do no more than stir a faint pity for the present Franklin; she was wishing—and it seemed the most irresistible longing of all her life—that Gerald Digby wanted to kiss her too. The memory and the wish threw her thoughts into confusion, but she was still able to maintain her calm, to smile at him and say, 'Certainly, let us talk.'

'But not about politics and philanthropy to-day,' said Gerald, who leaned his elbow on his knee and looked quietly yet intently at her; 'I want to talk about ourselves, if I may.'

'Do let us talk about ourselves,' said Althea.

'Well, I don't believe that what I'm going to say will surprise you. I'm sure you've seen how much I've come to care about you,' said Gerald.

Althea kept her eyes fixed calmly upon him; her self-command was great, even in the midst of an overpowering hope.

'I know that we are real friends,' she returned, smiling.

Her calm, her cool, sweet smile, like the light in the shaded room, were very pleasing to Gerald. 'Ah, yes, but that was only a step, you see,' he smiled back. He did not let her guess his full confidence, he took all the steps one after the other in their proper order. He couldn't give her romance, but he could give her every grace, and her calm made him feel, happily and securely, that grace would quite content her.

'You must see,' he went on, still with his eyes on hers, 'that it's more than that. You must see that you are dearer than that.' And then he brought out his simple question, 'Will you be my wife?'

Althea sat still and her mind whirled. Until then she had been unprepared. Her own feeling, the feeling that she had refused for days to look at, had been so strong that she had only known its strength and its danger to her pride; she had had no time to wonder about Gerald's feeling. And now, in its freedom, her feeling was so joyous that she could know only its joy. She was dear to him. He asked her to marry him. It seemed enough, more than enough, to make joy a permanent thing in her life. She had not imagined it possible to marry a man who did not woo and urge, who did not make her feel the ardour of his love. But, now, breathlessly, she found that reality was quite different from her imagination and yet so blissful that she could feel nothing wanting in it. And she could say nothing. She looked at him with her large eyes, gravely, and touched, a little abashed by their gaze, he took her hand, kissed it, and murmured, 'Please say you'll have me.'

'Do you love me?' Althea breathed out; it was not that she questioned or hesitated; the words came to her lips in answer to the situation rather than in questioning of him. And it was hardly a shock; it was, in a subtle way, a further realisation of exquisiteness, when the situation, in his reply, defined itself as a reality still further removed from her imagination of what such a situation should be.

Holding her hand, his gay brown eyes upon her, he said, after only the very slightest pause, 'Miss Jakes, I'm not a romantic person, you see that; you see the sort of person I am. I can't make pretty speeches, not when I'm serious, as I am now. When I make pretty speeches, I'm only flirting. I like you. I respect you. I've watched you here in my old home and I've thought, "If only she would make it home again." I've thought that you'd help me to make a new life. I want to come and live here, with you, and do the things I told you about—the things that needed money.'

His eyes were on hers, so quietly and so gravely, now, that they seemed to hold from her all ugly little interpretations; he trusted her with the true one, he trusted her not to see it as ugly. 'You see, I'm not romantic,' he went on, 'and I can only tell you the truth. I couldn't have thought of marrying you if you hadn't had money, but I needn't tell you that, if you'd had millions, I wouldn't have thought of marrying you unless I cared for you. So there it is, quite clear and simple. I think I can make you happy; will you make me happy?'

It was exquisite, the trust, the truth, the quiet gravity, and yet there was pain in the exquisiteness. She could not look at it yet distinctly for it seemed part of the beauty. It was rarer, more dignified, this wooing, than commonplace protestations of devotion. It was a large and beautiful life he opened to her and he needed her to make it real. They needed each other. Yet—here the pain hovered—they needed each other so differently. To her, he was the large and beautiful life; to him, she was only a part of it, and a means to it. But she could not look at pain. Pride was mounting in her, pride in him, her beloved and her possession. Before all the world, henceforth, he would be hers. And the greatness of that pride cast out lesser ones. He had discriminated, been carefully sincere; her sincerity did not need to be careful, it was an unqualified gift she had to make him. 'I love you,' she said. 'I will make it your home.'

And again Gerald was touched and a little confused. He kissed her hand and then, her eyes of mute avowal drawing him, he leaned to her and kissed her cheek. He felt it difficult to answer such a speech, and all that he found to say at last was, 'You will make me romantic, dear Althea.'

That evening he sought Helen out again; but he need not have come with his news, for it was none. Althea's blissful preoccupation and his gaiety had all the evening proclaimed the happy event. But he had to talk to Helen, and finding her on the terrace, he drew her hand through his arm and paced to and fro with her. She was silent, and, suddenly and oddly, he found it difficult to say anything. 'Well,' he ventured at last.

'Well,' Helen echoed in the darkness.

'It's all settled,' said Gerald.

'Yes,' said Helen.

'And I'm very happy.'

'I am so glad.'

'And she is really a great dear. Anything more generously sweet I've never encountered.'

'I'm so glad,' Helen repeated.

There seemed little more to say, but, before they went in, he squeezed her hand and added: 'If it hadn't been for you, I'd never have met her. Dear Helen, I have to thank you for my good fortune. I've always had to thank you for the nice things that have happened to me.'

But to this Helen demurred, though smiling apparently, as she answered, going in, 'Oh no, I don't think you have this to thank me for.'

After they had gone upstairs, Althea came to Helen's room, and putting her arms around her she hid her face on her shoulder. She was too happy to feel any sense of shyness. It was Helen who was shy. So shy that the tears rose to her eyes as she stood there, embraced. And, strangely, she felt, with all her disquiet at being so held by Althea, that the tears were not only for shyness, but for her friend. Althea's happiness touched her. It seemed greater than her situation warranted. Helen could not see the situation as rapturous. It was not such a tempered, such a reasonable joy that she could have accepted, had it been her part to accept or to decline. And, held by Althea, hot, shrinking, sorry, she was aware of another anger against Gerald.

'My dear Althea, I know. I do so heartily congratulate you and Gerald,' she said.

'He told you, dear Helen?'

'Yes, he told me, but of course I saw.'

'I feel now as if you were my sister,' said Althea, tightening her arms. 'We will always be very near each other, Helen. It is so beautiful to think that you brought us together, isn't it?'

Helen was forced to put the distasteful cup to her lips. 'Yes indeed,' she said.

'He is so dear, so wonderful,' said Althea. 'There is so much more in him than he knows himself. I want him to be a great man, Helen. I believe he can be, don't you?'

'I've never thought of Gerald as great,' Helen replied, trying to smile.

'Ah, well, wait; you will see! I suppose it is only a woman in love with a man who sees all his capacities. We will live here, and in London.' Althea, while she spoke her guileless assurance, raised her head and threw back her unbound hair, looking her full trust into Helen's eyes. 'I wouldn't care to live for more than half the year in the country, and it wouldn't be good for Gerald. I want to do so much, Helen, to make so many people happy, if I can. And, Helen dear,' she smiled now through her tears, 'if only you could be one of them; if only this could mean in some way a new opening in your life, too. One can never tell; happiness is such an infectious thing; if you are a great deal with two very happy people, you may catch the habit. I can't bear to think that you aren't happy, rare and lovely person that you are. I told Gerald so to-day. I said to him that I felt life hadn't given you any of the joy we all so need. Helen, dear, you must find your fairy-prince. You must, you shall fall in love, too.'

Helen controlled her face and gulped on. 'That's not so easily managed,' she remarked. 'I've seen a good many fairy-princes in my life, and either I haven't melted their hearts, or they haven't melted mine. We can't all draw lucky numbers, you know; there are not enough to go round.'

'As if anybody wouldn't fall in love with you, if you gave them the chance,' said Althea. 'You are the lucky number.'

Althea felt next day a certain tameness in the public reception of her news. She had not intended the news to be public yet for some time. Franklin's presence seemed to make an announcement something of an indelicacy, but, whether through her responsibility or whether through Gerald's, or whether through the obviousness of the situation, she found that everybody knew. It could not make commonplace to her her own inner joy, but she saw that to Aunt Julia, to the girls, to Lady Pickering, and Sir Charles, her position was commonplace. She was, to them, a nice American who was being married as much because she had money as because she was nice.

Aunt Julia voiced this aspect to her on the first opportunity, drawing her away after breakfast to walk with her along the terrace while she said, very gravely, 'Althea, dear, do you really think you'll be happy living in England?'

'Happier than anywhere else in the world,' said Althea.

'I didn't realise that you felt so completely expatriated.'

'England has always seemed very homelike to me, and this already is more of a home to me than any I have known for years,' said Althea, looking up at Merriston House.

'Poor child!' said Aunt Julia, 'what a comment on your rootless life. You must forgive me, Althea,' she went on in a lower voice, 'but I feel myself in a mother's place to you, and I do very much want to ask you to consider more carefully before you make things final. Mr. Digby is a charming man; but how little you have seen of him. I beg you to wait for a year before you marry.'

'I'm afraid I can't gratify you, Aunt Julia. I certainly can't ask Gerald to wait for a year.'

'My dear, why not!' Aunt Julia did not repress.

Althea went on calmly. 'It is true, of course, that we are not in love like two children, with no thought of responsibility or larger claims. You see, one outgrows that rather naïve American idea about marriage. Mine is, if you like, a mariage de convenance, in the sense that Gerald is a poor man and cannot marry unless he marries money. And I am proud to have the power to help him to build up a large and dignified life, and we don't intend to postpone our marriage when we know, trust, and love each other as we do.'

'A large life, my dear,' said Aunt Julia. 'Don't deceive yourself into thinking that. One needs a far larger fortune than your tiny one, nowadays, if one is to build up a large life. What I fear more than anything is that you don't in the least realise what English country life is all the year round. Imagine, if you can, your winters here.'

'I shan't spend many winters here,' said Althea smiling. She did not divulge her vague, bright plans to Aunt Julia, but they filled the future for her; she saw the London drawing-room where, when Gerald was in Parliament, she would gather delightful people together. Among such people, Lady Blair, Miss Buckston, her friends in Devonshire, and of Grimshaw Rectory, seemed hardly more than onlookers; they did not fit into the pictures of her new life.

And if they did not fit, what of Franklin? Even in old unsophisticated pictures of a salon he had been a figure adjusted with some difficulty. It had, in days that seemed immeasurably remote—days when she had wondered whether she could marry Franklin—it had been difficult to see herself introducing him with any sense of achievement to Lady Blair or to the Collings, and she knew now, clearly, why: in Lady Blair's drawing-room, as in Devonshire and at Grimshaw Rectory, Franklin would have looked a funny little man. How much more funny in the new setting. What would he do in it? What was it to mean to him? What would any setting mean to Franklin in which he was to see her as no longer needing him? For, and this was the worst of it, and in spite of happiness Althea felt it as a pang indeed, she no longer needed Franklin; and knowing this she longed at once to avoid and to atone to him.

She found him after her walk with Aunt Julia sitting behind a newspaper in the library. Franklin always read the newspapers every morning, and it struck Althea as particularly touching that this good habit should be persevered in under his present circumstances. She was so much touched by Franklin, the habit of old intimacy was so strong, that her own essential change of heart seemed effaced by the uprising of feeling for him. 'O Franklin!' she said. He had risen as she entered, and he stood looking at her with a smile. It seemed to receive her, to forgive, to understand. Almost weeping, she went to him with outstretched hands, faltering, 'I am so happy, and I am so sorry, dear Franklin. Oh, forgive me if I have hurt your life.'

He looked at her, no longer smiling, very gravely, holding her hands, and she knew that he was not thinking of his life, but of hers. And, with a further pang, she remembered that the last time they had stood so—she and Franklin—she had given him more hope for his life than ever before in all their histories. He must remember, too, and he must feel her unworthy in remembering, and even though she did not need Franklin, she could not bear him to think her unworthy. 'Forgive me,' she repeated. And the tears rose to her eyes. 'I've been so tossed, so unstable. I haven't known. I only know now, you see, dear Franklin. I've really fallen in love at last. Can you ever forgive me?'

'For not having fallen in love with me?' he asked gently.

'No, dear,' she answered, forced into complete sincerity. What was it in Franklin that compelled sincerity, and made it so easy to be sincere? There, at least, was a quality for which one would always need him. 'No, not for that, but for having thought that I might, perhaps, fall in love with you. It is the hope I gave you that must make this seem so sudden and so cruel.'

He had not felt her cruel, but he had felt something that was now giving his eyes their melancholy directness of gaze. He was looking at his Althea; he was not judging her; but he was wishing that she had been able to think of him a little more as mere friend, a little more as the man who, after all, had loved her all these years; wishing that she had not so completely forgotten him, so completely relegated and put him away when her new life was coming to her. But he understood, he did not judge, and he answered, 'I don't think you've been cruel, Althea dear, though it's been rather cruel of fortune, if you like, to arrange it in just this way. As for hurting my life, you've been the most beautiful thing in it.'

Something in his voice, final acceptance, final resignation, as though, seeing her go for ever, he bowed his head in silence, filled her with intolerable sadness. Was it that she wanted still to need him, or was it that she could not bear the thought that he might, some day, no longer need her?

The sense of an end of things, chill and penetrating like an autumnal wind, made all life seem bleak and grey for the moment. 'But, Franklin, you will always be my friend. That is not changed,' she said. 'Please tell me that nothing of that side of things is changed, dear Franklin.'

And now that sincerity in him, that truth-seeing and truth-speaking quality that was his power, became suddenly direful. For though he looked at her ever so gently and ever so tenderly, his eyes pierced her. And, helplessly, he placed the truth before them both, saying: 'I'll always be your friend, of course, dear Althea. You'll always be the most beautiful thing I've had in my life; but what can I be in yours? I don't belong over here, you know. I'll not be in your life any longer. How can it not be changed? How will you stay my friend, dear Althea?'

The tears rolled down her cheeks. That he should see, and accept, and still love her, made him seem dearer than ever before, while, in her heart, she knew that he spoke the truth. 'Don't—don't, dear Franklin,' she pleaded. 'You will be often with us. Don't talk as if it were at an end. How could our friendship have an end? Don't let me think that you are leaving me.'

He smiled a little, but it was a valorous smile. 'I'll never leave you in that way.'

'Don't speak, then, as if I were leaving you.'

But Franklin, though he smiled the valorous smile, couldn't give her a consolation not his to give. Did he see clearly, and for the first time, that he had always counted for her as a solace, a substitute for the things he couldn't be, and that now, when these things had come to her, he counted really for nothing at all? If he did see it, he didn't resent it; he would understand that, too, even though it left him with no foothold in her life. But he couldn't pretend—to give her comfort—that she needed him any longer. 'I want to count for anything you'll let me count for,' he said; 'but—it isn't your fault, dear—I don't think I will ever count for much, now; I don't see how I can. If that's being left, I guess I am left.'

She gazed at him, and all that she had to offer was her longing that the truth were not the truth, and for the moment of silent confrontation her pain was so great that its pressure brought an involuntary cry—protest or presage—it felt like both. 'You will—you will count—for much more, dear Franklin.'

She didn't know that it was the truth; his seemed to be the final truth; but it came, and it had to be said, and he could accept it as her confession and her atonement.

CHAPTER XVII.

Franklin was gone and Sir Charles was gone, and Lady Pickering soon followed, not in the least discomfited by the unexpected turn of events. Lady Pickering could hardly have borne to suspect that Gerald preferred to flirt with Miss Jakes rather than with herself; that he preferred to marry her was nothing of an affront. Althea herself was very soon to return to America for a month with Aunt Julia and the girls, settle business matters and see old friends before turning her face, this time for good, to the country that was now to be her home.

Franklin was gone, and Gerald and Helen were left, and all that Gerald more and more meant, all that was bright and alien too—the things of joy and the things of adjustment and of wonder—effaced poor Franklin while it emphasised those painful truths that he had seen and shown her and that she had only been able to protest against. The thought of Franklin came hardly at all, though the truths he had put before her lingered in a haunting sense of disappointment with herself; she had failed Franklin in deeper, more subtle ways than in the mere shattering of his hopes.

Althea had never been a good business woman; her affairs were taken care of for her in Boston by wise and careful cousins; but she found that Gerald, in spite of his air of irresponsibility, was a very good business man, and it was he who pointed out to her, with cheerful and affectionate frankness, that her fortune was not as large as she, with her heretofore unexacting demands on it, had imagined. It was only when Althea took for granted that it could suffice for much larger, new demands, that Gerald pointed out the facts of limitation; to himself, he made this clear and sweet, the facts were amply sufficient; there was more than enough for his sober wants. But Althea, sitting over the papers with him in the library, and looking rather vague and wistful, realised that if Gerald's wants were to be the chief consideration many of her own must, indeed, go unsatisfied. Gerald evidently took it perfectly for granted that her wants would be his. Looking up at the flat and faded portraits of bygone Digbys, while this last one, his charming eyes lifted so brightly and so intelligently upon her, made things clear, looking up, over his head, at these ancestors of her affianced, Althea saw in their aspect of happy composure that they, too, had always taken it for granted that their wives' wants were just that—just their own wants. She couldn't—not at first—lucidly articulate to herself any marked divergence between her wants and Gerald's; she, too, wanted to see Merriston House restored and made again into a home for Digbys; but Merriston House had been seen by her as a means, not as an end. She had seen it as a centre to a larger life; he saw it as a boundary beyond which they could not care to stray. After the golden bliss of the first days of her new life there, as Gerald's promised wife, there came for her a pause of rather perplexed reaction in this sense of limits, this sense of being placed in a position that she must keep, this strange sense of slow but sure metamorphosis into one of a succession of Mrs. Digbys whose wants were their husbands'.

'Yes, yes, I quite see, dear,' she said at intervals, while Gerald explained to her what it cost to keep up even such a small place. 'What a pity that those stocks of mine you were telling me about don't yield more. It isn't much we have, is it?'

'I think it's a great deal,' laughed Gerald. 'It's quite enough to be very happy on. And, first and foremost, when it's a question of happiness, and since you are so dear and generous, I shall be able to hunt at last and keep my own horses. I'm sick of being dependent on my friends for a mount now and then. Not that you'll have much sympathy with that particular form of happiness, I know,' he added, smiling, as he put his hand on her shoulder and scanned the next document.

Althea was silent for a moment. She hardly knew what the odd shock that went through her meant; then she recognised that it was fear. To see it as that gave her courage; at all events, love Gerald as she did, she would not be a coward for love of him. The effort was in her voice, making it tremulous, as she said: 'But, Gerald, you know I don't like hunting; you know I think it cruel.'

He looked at her; he smiled. 'So do I, you nice dear.'

'But you won't pain me by doing it—you will give it up?'

It was now his turn to look really a little frightened. 'But it's in my blood and bones, the joy of it, Althea. You wouldn't, seriously, ask me to give it up for a whim?'

'Oh, it isn't a whim.'

'A theory, then.'

'I think you ought to give it up for a theory like that one. Yes, I even think that you ought to give it up to please me.'

'But why shouldn't you give up your theory to please me?' He had turned his eyes on his papers now, and was feigning to scan them.

'It is a question of right and wrong to me.'

Gerald was silent for a moment. He was not irritated, she saw that; not angry. He quite recognised her point, and he didn't like her the less for holding to it; but he recognised his own point just as clearly, and, after the little pause, she found that he was resolute in holding to it.

'I'm afraid I can't give it up—even to please you, dear,' he said.

Althea sat looking down at the papers that lay on the table; she saw them through tears of helpless pain. There was nothing to be done and nothing to be said. She could not tell him that, since he did not love her sufficiently to give up a pleasure for her sake, she must give him up; nor could she tell him that he must not use her money for pleasures that she considered wrong. But it was this second impossible retort—the first, evidently, did not cross his mind—that was occupying Gerald. He was not slow in seeing delicacies, though he was slow indeed in seeing what might have been solemnities. The position couldn't strike him as solemn; he couldn't conceive that a woman might break off her engagement for such a cause; but he did see his own position of beneficiary as delicate.

His next words showed it: 'Of course I won't hunt here, if you really say not. I could go away to hunt. The difficulty is that we want to keep horses, don't we? and if I have a hunter it will be rather funny never to use him at home.'

Althea saw that it would be rather funny. 'If you have a hunter I would far rather you hunted here than that you went away to hunt.'

'Perhaps you'd rather I had a horse that couldn't hunt. The hunter would be your gift, of course. I could just go on depending on my friends for a mount, though that would look funny, too, wouldn't it?'

'If you will hunt, I want to give you your hunter.'

'In a sense it will be using your money to do something you disapprove of.' Gerald was smiling at her as though he felt that he was bringing her round to reasonableness. 'Perhaps that's ugly.'

'Please don't speak of the money; mine is yours.'

'That makes me seem all the dingier, I know,' said Gerald, half ruefully, yet still smiling at her. 'I do wish I could give it up, just to please you, but really I can't. You must just shut your eyes and pretend I'm not a brute.'

After this little encounter, which left its mark on Althea's heart, she felt that Gerald ought to be the more willing to yield in other things and to enter into her projects. 'Don't you think, dear,' she said to him a day or two after, when they were walking together, 'don't you think that you ought soon to be thinking of a seat in Parliament? That will be such a large, worthy life for you.'

Gerald, as they walked, was looking from right to left, happily, possessively, over the fields and woods. He brought his attention to her suggestion with a little effort, and then he laughed. 'Good gracious, no! I've no political views.'

'But oughtn't you to have them?'

'You shall provide me with them, dear.'

'Gladly; and will you use them?'

'Not in Parliament,' laughed Gerald.

'But seriously, dear, I hope you will think of it.'

He turned gay, protesting, and now astonished eyes upon her. 'But I can't think of it seriously. Old Battersby is a member for these parts, and his seat is as firm as a rock.'

'Can't you find another seat?'

'But, my dear, even if I had any leaning that way, which I haven't, where am I to find the time and money?'

'Give less time and money to hunting,' she could not repress.

But, over the sinking of her heart, she kept her voice light, and Gerald, all unsuspecting, answered, as if it were a harmless jest they were bandying, 'What a horrid score! But, yes, it's quite true; I want my time for hunting and farming and studying a bit, and then you mustn't forget that I enjoy dabbling at my painting in my spare moments and have the company of my wise and charming Althea to cultivate. I've quite enough to fill my time with.'

She was baffled, perplexed, and hurt. Her thoughts fixed with some irony on his painting. Dabble at it indeed. Gerald had shown her some of his sketches and they had hardly seemed to Althea to merit more than that description. Her own tastes had grown up securely framed by books and lectures. Her speciality was early Italian art. She liked pictures of Madonnas surrounded by exquisite accessories—all of which she accurately remembered. She didn't at all care for Japanese prints, and Gerald's sketches looked to her rather like Japanese prints. She really didn't imagine that he intended her to take them seriously, and when he had brought them out and shown them to her she had said, 'Pretty, very pretty indeed, dear; really you have talent, I'm sure of it. With hard work, under a good master, you might have become quite a painter.' She had then seen the little look of discomfiture on Gerald's face, though he laughed good-humouredly as he put away his sketches, saying to Helen, who was present, 'I'm put in my place, you see.'

Althea had hastened to add, 'But, dear, really I think them very pretty. They show quite a direct, simple feeling for colour. Don't they, Helen? Don't you feel with me that they are very pretty?'

Helen had said that she knew nothing about pictures, but liked Gerald's very much.

It was hard now to be asked to accept this vagrant artistry instead of the large, political life she had seen for him. And what of the London drawing-room?

'You must keep in touch with people, Gerald,' she said. 'You mustn't sink into the country squire for ever.'

'Oh, but that's just what I want to sink into,' said Gerald. 'Don't bother about people, though, dear. We can have plenty of people to stay with us, and go about a bit ourselves.'

'But we must be in London for part of the year,' said Althea.

'Oh, you will run up now and then for a week whenever you like,' said Gerald.

'A week! How can one keep in touch with what is going on in a week? Can't we take a little house there? One of those nice little old houses in Westminster, for example?'

'A house, my dear! Why, you don't want to leave Merriston, do you? What would become of Merriston if we had a house in London—and of all our plans? We really couldn't manage that, dear—we really couldn't afford it.'

Yes, she saw the life very distinctly, now; that of the former Mrs. Digbys—that of cheerful squiress and wise helpmate. And, charmed though she was with her lover, Althea was not charmed with that prospect. She promised herself that things should turn out rather differently. What was uncomfortable already was to find that her promises were becoming vague and tentative. There was a new sense of bondage. Bliss was in it, but the bonds began to chafe.

CHAPTER XVIII.

On a chill day in late October, Franklin Winslow Kane walked slowly down a narrow street near Eaton Square examining the numbers on the doors as he passed. He held his umbrella open over his shoulder, for propitiation rather than for shelter, since the white fog had not yet formed into a drizzle. His trousers were turned up, and his feet, wisely, for the streets were wet and slimy, encased in neat galoshes. After a little puzzling at the end of the street, where the numbers became confusing, he found the house he sought on the other side—a narrow house, painted grey, a shining knocker upon its bright green door, and rows of evenly clipped box in each window. Franklin picked his way over the road and rang the bell. This was his first stay in London since his departure from Merriston in August. He had been in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Birmingham, and Edinburgh. He had made friends and found many interests. The sense of scientific links between his own country and England had much enlarged his consciousness of world-citizenship. He had ceased altogether to feel like a tourist, he had almost ceased to feel like an alien; how could he feel so when he had come to know so many people who had exactly his own interests? This wider scope of understanding sympathy was the main enlargement that had come to him, at least it was the main enlargement for his own consciousness. Another enlargement there was, but it seemed purely personal and occupied his thoughts far less.

He waited now upon the doorstep of old Miss Buchanan's London house, and he had come there to call upon young Miss Buchanan. The memory of Helen's unobtrusive, wonderfully understanding kindness to him during his last days at Merriston, remained for him as the only bright spot in a desolate blankness. He had not seen her again. She had been paying visits, but she had written in return to a note of inquiry from Cambridge, to say that she was settled, now, in London for a long time and that she would be delighted to see him on the day he suggested—that of his arrival in town.

He was ushered by the most staid, most crisp of parlour-maids, not into Helen's own little sanctum downstairs, but into the drawing-room. It was a narrow room, running to the back of the house where a long window showed a ghostly tree in the fog outside, and it was very much crowded with over-large furniture gathered together from Miss Buchanan's past. There were chintz-covered chairs and sofas that one had to make one's way around, and there were cabinets filled with china, and there were tables with reviews and book-cutters laid out on them. And it was the most cheerful of rooms; three canaries sang loudly in a spacious gilt cage that stood in a window, the tea-table was laid before the fire, and the leaping firelight played on the massive form of the black cat, dozing in his basket, on the gilt of the canaries' cage, on the china in the cabinets, the polished surface of the chintz, and the copper kettle on the tea-table.

Franklin stood and looked about him, highly interested. He liked to think that Helen had such a comfortable refuge to fall back upon, though by the time that old Miss Buchanan appeared he had reflected that so much comfort might be just the impediment that had prevented her from taking to her wings as he felt persuaded she could and should do. Old Miss Buchanan interested him even more than her room. She was a firm, ample woman of over sixty, with plentiful grey hair brushed back uncompromisingly from her brow, tight lips, small, attentive eyes with projecting eyebrows over them, and an expression at once of reticence and cordiality. She wore a black dress of an old-fashioned cut, and round her neck was a heavy gold chain and a large gold locket.

Helen would be in directly, she said, and expected him.

Franklin saw at once that she took him for granted, and that she was probably in the habit of taking all Helen's acquaintances for granted, and of making them comfortable until Helen came and took them off her hands. She had, he inferred, many interests of her own, and did not waste much conjecture on stray callers. Franklin was quite content to count as a stray caller, and he had always conjecture enough for two in any encounter. He talked away in his even, deliberate tones, while they drank tea and ate the hottest of muffins that stood in a covered dish on a brass tripod before the fire, and, while they talked, Miss Buchanan shot rather sharper glances at him from under her eyebrows.

'So you were at Merriston with Helen's Miss Jakes,' she said, placing him. 'It made a match, that party, didn't it? Quite a good thing for Gerald Digby, too, I hear. Miss Jakes is soon to be back, Helen tells me.'

'Next week,' said Franklin.

'And the wedding for November.'

'So I'm told.'

'You've known Miss Jakes for some time?'

'For almost all my life,' said Franklin, with his calm and candid smile.

'Oh, old friends, then. You come from Boston, too, perhaps?'

'Well, I come from the suburbs, in the first place, but I've been in the hub itself for a long time now,' said Franklin. 'Yes, I'm a very old friend of Miss Jakes's. I'm very much attached to her.'

'Ah, and are you pleased with the match?'

'It seems to please Althea, and that's the main thing. I think Mr. Digby will make her happy; yes, I'm pleased.'

'Yes,' said Miss Buchanan meditatively. 'Yes, I suppose Gerald Digby will make a pleasant husband. He's a pleasant creature. I've always considered him very selfish, I confess; but women seem to fall in love with selfish men.'

Franklin received this ambiguous assurance with a moment or so of silence, and then remarked that marriage might make Mr. Digby less selfish.

'You mean,' said Miss Buchanan, 'that she's selfish too, and won't let him have it all his own way?'

Franklin did not mean that at all. 'Life with a high-minded, true-hearted woman sometimes alters a man,' he commented.

'Oh, she's that, is she?' said Miss Buchanan. 'I've not met her yet, you see. Well, I don't know that I've much expectation of seeing Gerald Digby alter. But he's a pleasant creature, as I said, and I don't think he's a man to make any woman unhappy. In any case your friend is probably better off married to a pleasant, selfish man than not married at all,' and Miss Buchanan smiled a tight, kindly smile. 'I don't like this modern plan of not getting married. I want all the nice young women I know to get married, and the sooner the better; it gives them less time to fuss over their feelings.'

'Well, it's better to fuss before than after, isn't it?' Franklin inquired.

'Fussing after doesn't do much harm,' said Miss Buchanan, 'and there's not so much time for fussing then. It's fussing before that leaves so many of the nicest girls old maids. My niece Helen is the nicest girl I know, and I sometimes think she'll never marry now. It vexes me very much,' said Miss Buchanan.

'She's a very nice girl,' said Franklin. 'And she's a very noble woman. But she doesn't know it; she doesn't know her own capacities. I'm very much attached to your niece, Miss Buchanan.'

Miss Buchanan shot him another glance and then laughed. 'Well, we can shake hands over that,' she remarked. 'So am I. And you are quite right; she is a fine creature and she's never had a chance.'

'Ah, that's just my point,' said Franklin gravely. 'She ought to have a chance; it ought to be made for her, if she can't make it for herself. And she's too big a person for that commonplace solution of yours, Miss Buchanan. You're of the old ideas, I see; you don't think of women as separate individuals, with their own worth and identity. You think of them as borrowing worth and identity from some man. Now that may be good enough for the nice girl who's only a nice girl, but it's not good enough for your niece, not good enough for a noble woman. I'd ask a happy marriage for her, of course, but I'd ask a great deal more. She ought to put herself to some work, develop herself, find herself all round.'

Miss Buchanan, while Franklin delivered himself of these convictions, leaned back in her chair, her arms crossed on her bosom, and observed him with amused intentness. When he had done, she thus continued to observe him for some moments of silence. 'No, I'm of the old ideas,' she said at last. 'I don't want work for Helen, or development, or anything of that sort. I want happiness and the normal life. I don't care about women doing things, in that sense, unless they've nothing better to do. If Helen were married to a man of position and ability she would have quite enough to occupy her. Women like Helen are made to hold and decorate great positions; it's the ugly, the insignificant women, who can do the work of the world.'

Franklin heard her with a cheerful, unmoved countenance, and after a moment of reflection observed, 'Well, that seems to me mighty hard on the women who aren't ugly and insignificant—mighty hard,' and as Miss Buchanan looked mystified, he was going on to demonstrate to her that to do the work of the world was every human creature's highest privilege, when Helen entered.

Franklin, as he rose and saw his friend again, had a new impression of her and a rather perturbing one. Little versed as he was in the lore of the world—the world in Miss Buchanan's sense—he felt that Helen, perhaps, expressed what Miss Buchanan could not prove. It was true, her lovely, recondite personality seemed to flash it before him, she didn't fit easily into his theories of efficiency and self-development by effort. Effort—other people's effort—seemed to have done long ago all that was necessary for her. She was developed, she was finished, she seemed to belong to quite another order of things from that which he believed in, to an order framed for her production, as it were, and justified, perhaps, by her mere existence. She was like a flower, and ought a flower to be asked to do more than to show itself and bloom in silence?

Franklin hardly formulated these heresies; they hovered, only, as a sort of atmosphere that had its charm and yet its sadness too, and that seemed, in charm and sadness, to be part of Helen Buchanan's very being.

She had taken his hand and was looking at him with those eyes of distant kindness—so kind and yet so distant—and she said in the voice that was so sincere and so decisive, a voice sweet and cold as a mountain brook, that she was very glad to see him again.

Yes, she was like a flower, a flower removed immeasurably from his world; a flower in a crystal vase, set on a high and precious cabinet, and to be approached only over stretches of shining floor. What had he to do with, or to think of, such a young woman who, though poverty-stricken, looked like a princess, and who, though smiling, had at her heart, he knew, a despair of life?

'I'm very glad indeed to see you,' he said gravely, despite himself, and scanning her face; 'it seems a very long time.'

'Does that mean that you have been doing a great deal?'

'Yes; and I suppose it means that I've missed you a great deal, too,' said Franklin. 'I got into the habit of you at Merriston; I feel it's queer not to find you in a chair under a tree every day.'

'I know,' said Helen; 'one gets so used to people at country houses; it's seeing them at breakfast that does it, I think. It was nice under that tree, wasn't it? and how lazy I was. I'm much more energetic now; I've got to the Purgatory, with the dictionary. Am I to have a fresh pot of tea to myself, kind Aunt Grizel? You see how I am spoiled, Mr. Kane.'

She had drawn off her gloves and tossed aside her long, soft coat—that looked like nobody else's coat—and, thin and black and idle, she sat in a low chair by the fire, and put out her hand for her cup. 'I've been to a musical,' she said. And she told them how she had been wedged into a corner for an interminable sonata and hadn't been able to get away. 'I tried to, once, but my hostess saw me and made a most ominous hiss at me; every one's eye was turned on me, and I sank back again, covered with shame and confusion.'

Then she questioned him, and Franklin told her about his interesting little tour, and the men he had met and the work they were doing. 'Splendid work, I can tell you,' said Franklin, 'and you have splendid men. It's been a great time for me; it's done me a lot of good. I feel as if I'd got hold of England; it's almost like being at home when you find so many splendid people interested in the things that interest you.'

And presently, after a little pause, in which he contemplated the fire, he added, lifting his eyes to Helen and smiling over the further idea: 'And see here, I'm forgetting another thing that's happened to me since I saw you.'

'Something nice, I hope.'

'Well, that depends on how one looks at it,' said Franklin, considering. 'I can't say that it pleases me; it rather oppresses me, in fact. But I'm going to get even with it, though that will take thought—thought and training.'

'It sounds as though you were going to be a jockey.'

'No, I'm not going to be a jockey,' said Franklin. 'It's more solemn than you think. What do you say to this? I'm a millionaire; I'm a multi-millionaire. If that isn't solemn I don't know what is.'

Miss Grizel Buchanan put down the long golf-stocking she was knitting, and, over her spectacles, fixed her eyes on the strange young man who had delayed till now the telling of this piece of news. She examined him. In all her experience she had never come across anything like him. Helen gave a little exclamation.

'My dear Mr. Kane, I do congratulate you,' she said.

'Why?' asked Franklin.

'Why, it's glorious news,' said Helen.

'I don't know about that,' said Franklin. 'I'm not a glorious person. The mere fact of being a millionaire isn't glorious; it may be lamentable.'

'The mere fact of power is glorious. What shall you do?' asked Helen, gazing thoughtfully at him as though to see in him all the far, new possibilities.

'Well, I shall do as much as I can for my own science of physics—that is rather glorious, I own. I shall be able to help the first-rate men to get at all sorts of problems, perhaps. Yes, that is rather glorious.'

'And won't you build model villages and buy a castle and marry a princess?'

'I don't like castles and I don't know anything about princesses,' said Franklin, smiling. 'As for philanthropy, I'll let people wiser than I am at it think out plans for doing good with the money. I'll devote myself to doing what I know something about. I do know something about physics, and I believe I can do something in that direction.'

'You take your good fortune very calmly, Mr. Kane,' Miss Grizel now observed. 'How long have you known about it?'

'Well, I heard a week ago, and news has been piling in ever since. I'm fairly snowed up with cables,' said Franklin. 'It's an old uncle of mine—my mother's brother—who's left it to me. He always liked me; we were always great friends. He went out west and built railroads and made a fortune—honestly, too; the money is clean—as clean as you can get it nowadays, that is to say. I couldn't take it if it wasn't. The only thing to do with money that isn't clean is to hand it over to the people it's been wrongfully taken from—to the nation, you know. It's a pity that isn't done; it would be a lot better than building universities and hospitals with it—though it's a problem; yes, I know it's a problem.' Franklin seemed to-day rather oppressed with a sense of problems. He gave this one up after a thoughtful survey of the fire, and went on: 'He was a fine old fellow, my uncle; I didn't see him often, but we sometimes wrote, and he used to like to hear how I was getting on in my work. He didn't know much about it; I don't think he ever got over thinking that atoms were a sort of bug,' Franklin smiled, unaware of his listeners' surprise; 'but he seemed to like to hear, so I always told him everything I'd time to write about. It made me sad to hear he'd gone; but it was a fine life, yes, it was a mighty big, fine, useful life,' said Franklin Kane, looking thoughtfully into the fire. And while he looked, musing over his memories, Miss Buchanan and her niece exchanged glances. 'This is a very odd creature, and a very nice one,' Miss Grizel's glance said; and Helen's replied, with playful eyebrows and tender lips, 'Isn't he a funny dear?'

'Now, see here,' said Franklin, looking up from his appreciative retrospect and coming back to the present and its possibilities, 'now that I've got all this money, you must let me spend a little of it on having good times. You must let me take you to plays and concerts—anything you've time for; and I hope, Miss Buchanan,' said Franklin, turning his bright gaze upon the older lady, 'that I can persuade you to come too.'

Helen said that she would be delighted, and Miss Grizel avowed herself a devoted playgoer, and Franklin, taking out his notebook, inscribed their willingness to do a play on Wednesday night. 'Now,' he said, scanning its pages, 'Althea lands on Friday and Mr. Digby goes to meet her, I suppose. They must come in, too; we'll all have fun together.'

'Gerald can't meet her,' said Helen; 'he has an engagement in the country, and doesn't get back to London till Saturday. It's an old standing engagement for a ball. I'm to welcome Althea back to London for him.'

Franklin paused, his notebook in his hand, and looked over it at Helen. He seemed taken aback, though at once he mastered his surprise. 'Oh, is that so?' was his only comment. Then he added, after a moment's reflection: 'Well, I guess I'll run up and meet her myself, then. I've always met and seen her off in America, and we'll keep up the old custom on this side.'

'That would be very nice of you,' said Helen. 'Of course she has that invaluable Amélie to look after her, and, of course, Gerald knew that she would be all right, or he would have managed it.'

'Of course,' said Franklin. 'And we'll keep up the old custom.'

That evening there arrived for Miss Buchanan and her niece two large boxes—one for Miss Grizel, containing carnations and roses, and one for Helen containing violets. Also, for the younger lady, was a smaller—yet still a large box—of intricately packed and very sophisticated sweets. Upon them Mr. Kane had laid a card which read: 'I don't approve of them, but I'm sending them in the hope that you do.' Another box for Miss Grizel contained fresh groundsel and chickweed for her canaries.

CHAPTER XIX.

Althea was an excellent sailor and her voyage back to England was as smooth and as swift as money could make it. She had been seen off by many affectionate friends, and, since leaving America, the literature, the flowers and the fruit with which they had provided her had helped to pass the hours, tedious at best on ship-board. Two other friends, not so near, but very pleasant—they were New York people—were also making the voyage, but as they were all very sea-sick, intercourse with them consisted mainly in looking in upon them as they lay, mute and enduring, within their berths, and cheering them with the latest reports of progress. Althea looked in upon them frequently, and she read all her books, and much of her time, besides, had been spent in long, formless meditations—her eyes fixed on the rippled, grey expanse of the Atlantic while she lay encased in furs on her deck chair. These meditations were not precisely melancholy, it was rather a brooding sense of vague perplexity that filled the dream-like hours. She had left her native land, and she was speeding towards her lover and towards her new life; there might have been exhilaration as well as melancholy in these facts. But though she was not melancholy, she was not exhilarated. It was a confused regret that came over her in remembering Boston, and it was a confused expectancy that filled her when she looked forward to Gerald. Gerald had written to her punctually once a week while she had been in America, short, but very vivid, very interesting and affectionate letters. They told her about what he was doing, what he was reading, the people he saw and his projects for their new life together. He took it for granted that this was what she wanted, and of course it was what she wanted, only—and it was here that the confused regrets arose in remembering Boston—the letters received there, where she was so much of a centre and so little of a satellite, had seemed, in some way, lacking in certain elements that Boston supplied, but that Merriston House, she more and more distinctly saw, would never offer. She was, for her own little circle, quite important in Boston. At Merriston House she would be important only as Gerald Digby's wife and as the mistress of his home, and that indeed—this was another slightly confusing fact—would not be great importance. Even in Boston, she had felt, her importance was still entirely personal; she had gained none from her coming marriage. Her friends were perfectly accustomed to the thought of coronets and ancient estates in connection with foreign alliances, and Althea was a little vexed in feeling that they really did not appreciate at its full value the significance of a simple English gentleman with a small country seat. 'I suppose you'll live quite quietly, Althea, dear,' more than one old friend had said, with an approbation not altogether grateful to her. 'Your aunt tells me that it's such a nice little place, your future home. I'm so glad you are not making a great worldly match.' Althea had no wish to make a great worldly match, but she did not care that her friends should see her upon such an over-emphatically sober background.

The report of Gerald's charm had been the really luminous fact in her new situation, and it had been most generously spread by Aunt Julia. Althea had felt warmed by the compensatory brightness it cast about her. Althea Jakes was not going to make a great match, but she was, and everybody knew it, going to marry a 'perfectly charming' man. This, after all, was to be crowned with beams. It was upon the thought of that charm that she dwelt when the long meditations became oppressively confused. She might be giving up certain things—symbolised by the books, the fruit, the flowers, that testified to her importance in Boston; she might be going to accept certain difficulties and certain disappointments, but the firm ground on which she stood was the fact that Gerald was charming. At moments she felt herself yearn towards that charm; it was a reviving radiance in which she must steep her rather numbed and rather weary being. To see his eyes, to see his smile, to hear his voice that made her think of bells and breezes, would be enough to banish wistfulness, or, at all events, to put it in its proper place as merely temporary and negligible.

Althea's heart beat fast as the shores of Ireland stole softly into sight on a pearly horizon, and it really fluttered, like that of any love-sick girl, when her packet of letters was brought to her at Queenstown. In Gerald's she would feel the central rays coming out to greet her. But when she had read Gerald's letter it was as if a blank curtain had fallen before her, shutting out all rays. He was not coming to meet her at Liverpool. The sharpness of her dismay was like a box on the ear, and it brought tears to her eyes and anger to her heart. Yes, actually, with no contrition, or consciousness of the need for it, he said quite gaily and simply that he would see her in London on Saturday; he had a ball in the country for Friday night. He offered not the least apology. He was perfectly unaware of guilt. And it was this innocence that, after the first anger, filled poor Althea with fear. What did it bode for the future? Meanwhile there was the humiliating fact to face that she, the cherished and appreciated Althea, who had never returned to America without at least three devoted friends to welcome her, was to land on the dismal Liverpool docks and find no lover to greet her there. What would Mrs. Peel and Sally Arlington think when they saw her so bereft? It was the realisation of what they would think, the memory of the American wonder at the Englishman's traditional indifference to what the American woman considered her due in careful chivalry, that roused her pride to the necessity of self-preservation. Mrs. Peel and Sally, at all events, should not imagine her to be either angry or surprised. She would show them the untroubled matter-of-fact of the English wife. And she succeeded admirably in this. When Miss Arlington, sitting up and dressed at last, said, in Mrs. Peel's cabin, where, leaning on Althea's arm, she had feebly crept to tea, 'And what fun, Althea, to think that we shall see him to-morrow morning,' Althea opened candidly surprised eyes: 'See him? Who, dear?'

'Why, Mr. Digby, of course. Who else could be him?' said Miss Arlington.

'But he isn't coming to Liverpool,' said Althea blandly.

'Not coming to meet you?' Only tact controlled the amazement in Miss Arlington's question.

'Didn't you know? Gerald is a very busy man; he has had a long-standing engagement for this week, and besides I shouldn't have liked him to come. I'd far rather meet comfortably in London, where I shall see him the first thing on Saturday. And then you'll see him too.'

She only wished that she could really feel, what she showed them—such calm, such reasonableness, and such detachment.

It was with a gloomy eye that she surveyed the Liverpool docks in the bleak dawn next morning, seated in her chair, Amélie beside her, a competent Atlas, bearing a complicated assortment of bags, rugs, and wraps. No, she had nothing to hope from these inhospitable shores; no welcoming eyes were there to greet hers. It was difficult not to cry as she watched the ugly docks draw near and saw the rows of ugly human faces upturned upon it—peculiarly ugly in colour the human face at this hour of the morning. Then, suddenly, Amélie made a little exclamation and observed in dispassionate yet approving tones, 'Tiens; et voilà Monsieur Frankline.'

'Who? Where?' Althea rose in her chair.

'Mais oui; c'est bien Monsieur Frankline,' Amélie pointed. 'Voilà ce qui est gentil, par exemple,' and by this comment of Amélie's Althea knew that Gerald's absence was observed and judged. She got out of her chair, yet with a strange reluctance. It was not pleasure that she felt; it was, rather, a fuller realisation of pain. Going to the railing she looked down at the wharf. Yes, there was Franklin's pale buff-coloured countenance raised to hers, serene and smiling. He waved his hat. Althea was only able not to look dismayed and miserable in waving back. That Franklin should care enough to come; that Gerald should care too little. But she drew herself together to smile brightly down upon her faithful lover. Franklin—Franklin above all—must not guess what she was feeling.

'Well,' were his first words, as she came down the gangway, 'I thought we'd keep up our old American habits.' The words, she felt, were very tactful; they made things easier for her; they even comforted her a little. One mustn't be too hard on Gerald if it was an American habit.

'It is a nice one,' she said, grasping Franklin's hand. 'I must make Gerald acquire it.'

'Why don't you keep it for me?' smiled Franklin. She felt, as he piloted her to the Customs, that either his tact or his ingenuousness was sublime. She leaned on it, whichever it was.

'Have you seen Gerald?' she asked, as they stood beside her marshalled array of boxes. 'He seemed very fit and happy in the letters I had at Queenstown.'

'No, I've not seen him yet,' smiled Franklin, looking about to catch the eye of an official.