'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 Amelie 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?'