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 naive 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 Amelie 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, Amelie 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, Amelie made a little exclamation and observed in dispassionate yet approving tones, 'Tiens; et voila Monsieur Frankline.'

'Who? Where?' Althea rose in her chair.

'Mais oui; c'est bien Monsieur Frankline,' Amelie pointed. 'Voila ce qui est gentil, par exemple,' and by this comment of Amelie'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.

'Then'—was on the tip of Althea's tongue—'how did you know I was not going to be met?' She checked the revealing question, and Franklin's next remark—whether tactful or ingenuous in its appropriateness she once more could not tell—answered it: 'I've been seeing a good deal of Miss Buchanan; she told me Mr. Digby wouldn't be able to come up here.'

'Oh—Helen!' Althea was thankful to be able to pass from the theme of Gerald and his inabilities. 'So you have been seeing her. Have you been long in London? Have you seen her often?'

'I got to London last Monday, and I've seen her as often as she could let me. We're very good friends, you know,' said Franklin.

She didn't know at all, and she found the information rather bewildering. At Merriston her own situation had far too deeply absorbed her to leave her much attention for other people's. She had only noticed that Helen had been kind to Franklin. She suspected that it was now his ingenuousness that idealised Helen's tolerant kindness. But though her superior sophistication made a little touch of irony unavoidable, it was overwhelmed in the warm sense of gratitude.

Everything was in readiness for her; her corner seat in the train, facing the engine; a foot-warmer; the latest magazines, and a box of fruit. How it all brought back Boston—dear Boston—and the reviving consciousness of imaginative affection. And how it brought back Franklin. Well, everybody ought to be his good friend, even if they weren't so in reality.

'You didn't suppose I'd forget you liked muscatels?' inquired Franklin, with a mild and unreproachful gentleness when she exclaimed over the nectarines and grapes. 'Now, please, sit back and let me put this rug around you; it's chilly, and you look rather pale.' He then went off and looked out for her friends and for Amelie. Mrs. Peel and Sally, when they arrived with him, showed more than the general warmth of compatriots in a foreign land. They knew Franklin but slightly, and he could but have counted with them as one of Althea's former suitors; but now, she saw it, he took his place in their eyes as the devoted friend, and, as the journey went on, counted for more and more in his own right. Sally and Mrs. Peel evidently thought Franklin a dear. Althea thought so too, her eyes dwelling on him with wistful observation. There was no charm; there never had been charm; but the thought of charm sickened her a little just now. What she rested in was this affection, this kindness, this constant devotion that had never failed her in the greatest or the littlest things. And though it was not to see him change into a different creature, not to see him move on into a different category—as he had changed and moved in the eyes of the Miss Buchanans—he did gain in significance when, after a little while, he informed them of the new fact in his life—the fact of millions. They were Americans of an old stock, and millions meant to them very external and slightly suspicious things—things associated with rawness and low ideals; but they couldn't associate Franklin with low ideals. They exclaimed with interest and sympathy over his adventure, and they felt nothing funny in his projects for benefiting physics. They all understood each other; they took light things—like millions—lightly, and grave things—like ideals and responsibilities—gravely. And, ah yes, there it was—Althea turning her head to look at the speeding landscape of autumnal pearl and gold, thought, over her sense of smothered tears—they knew what things were really serious. They couldn't mistake the apparent for the real triviality; they knew that some symbols of affection—trifling as they might be—were almost necessary. But then they understood affection. It was at this point that her sore heart sank to a leaden depression. Affection—cherishing, forestalling, imaginative affection—there was no lack of it, she was sure of that, in this beautiful England of pearl and gold which, in its melancholy, its sweetness, its breathing out of memories immemorial, so penetrated and possessed her; but was there not a terrible lack of it in the England that was to be hers, and where she was to make her home?



CHAPTER XX.

It was four days after Althea's arrival in London that Gerald stood in Helen's sitting-room and confronted her—smoking her cigarette in her low chair—as he had confronted her that summer on her return from Paris. Gerald looked rather absent and he looked rather worried, and Helen, who had observed these facts the moment he came in, was able to observe them for some time while he stood there before her, not looking at her, looking at nothing in particular, his eyes turning vaguely from the mist-enveloped trees outside to the flowers on the writing-table, and his eyebrows, always very expressive, knitting themselves a little or lifting as if in the attempt to dispel recurrent and oppressive preoccupations. It would have been natural in their free intercourse that, after a certain lapse of time, Helen should ask him what the matter was, helping him often, with the mere question, to recognise that something was the matter. But to-day she said nothing, and it was her silence instead of her questioning that made Gerald aware that he was standing there expecting to have his state of mind probed and then elucidated. It added a little to his sense of perplexity that Helen should be silent, and it was with a slight irritation that he turned and kicked a log before saying—'I'm rather bothered, Helen.'

'What is it?' said Helen. 'Money?' This had often been a bother to them both.

Half turned from her, he shook his head. 'No, not money; that's all right now, thanks to Althea.'

'Well?' Helen questioned.

He faced her again, a little quizzical, a little confused and at a loss. 'I suppose it's Althea herself.'

'Oh!' said Helen. She said it with a perceptible, though very mild change of tone; but Gerald, in his preoccupation, did not notice the change.

'You've seen her several times since she came back?' he asked.

'Yes, twice; I lunched with her and these American friends of hers yesterday,' said Helen.

'Well, I've seen her three times,' said Gerald. 'I went to her, as you know, directly I got back to London on Saturday; I cut my visit at the Fanshawes two days shorter on purpose. I saw her on Sunday, and I'm just come from her now. No one could say that I didn't show her every attention, could they?' It hardly seemed a question, and Helen did not answer it. 'I don't think she's quite pleased with me,' Gerald then brought out.

Still silent, Helen looked at him thoughtfully, but her gaze gave him no clue.

'Can you imagine why not?' he asked.

She reflected, then she said that she couldn't.

'Well,' said Gerald, 'I think it's because I didn't go to meet her at Liverpool; from something she said, I think it's that. But I never dreamed she'd mind, you know. And, really, I ask you, Helen, is it reasonable to expect a man to give up a long-standing engagement and take that dreary journey up to that dreary place—I've never seen the Liverpool docks, but I can imagine them at six o'clock in the morning—is it reasonable, I say, to expect that of any man? It wasn't as if I wasn't to see her the next day.'

Again Helen carefully considered. 'I suppose she found the docks very dreary—at six o'clock,' she suggested.

'But surely that's not a reason for wanting me to find them dreary too,' Gerald laughed rather impatiently. 'I'd have had to go up to Liverpool on Thursday and spend the night there; do you realise that?'

Helen went on with the theme of the docks: 'I suppose she wouldn't have found them so dreary if you'd been on them; and I suppose she expected you not to find them dreary for the same reason.'

Gerald contemplated this lucid statement of the case. 'Has she talked to you about it?' he asked.

'Not a word. Althea is very proud. If you have hurt her it is the last thing that she would talk about.'

'I know she's proud and romantic, and a perfect dear, of course; but do you really think it a ground for complaint? I mean—would you have felt hurt in a similar case?'

'I? No, I don't suppose so; but Althea, I think, is used to a great deal of consideration.'

'But, by Jove, Helen, I'm not inconsiderate!'

'Not considerate, in the way Althea is used to.'

'Ah, that's just it,' said Gerald, as if, now, they had reached the centre of his difficulty; 'and I can't pretend to be, either. I can't pretend to be like Mr. Kane. Imagine that quaint little fellow going up to meet her. You must own it's rather grotesque—rather tasteless, too, I think, under the circumstances.'

'They are very old friends.'

'Well, but after all, he's Althea's rejected suitor.'

'It wasn't as a suitor, it was as a friend he went. The fact that she rejected him doesn't make him any less her friend, or any less solicitous about her.'

'It makes me look silly, her rejected suitor showing more solicitude than I do—unless it makes him look silly; I rather feel it's that way. But, apart from that, about Althea, I'm really bothered. It's all right, of course; I've brought her round. I laughed at her a little and teased her a little, and told her not to be a dear little goose, you know. But, Helen, deuce take it! the trouble is——' Again Gerald turned and kicked the log, and then, his hands on the mantelpiece, he gazed with frowning intentness into the flames. 'She takes it all so much more seriously than I do,' so he finally brought out his distress; 'so much more seriously than I can, you know. It's all right, of course; only one doesn't know quite how to get on.' And now, turning to Helen, he found her eyes on his, and her silence became significant to him. There was no response in her eyes; they were veiled, mute; they observed him; they told him nothing. And he had a sense, new to him and quite inexpressibly painful, of being shut out. 'I may go on talking to you—about everything—as I have always done, Helen?' he said. It was hardly a question; he couldn't really dream that there was anything not to be talked out with Helen. But there was. Gerald received one of the ugliest shocks of his life when Helen said to him in her careful voice: 'You may not talk about Althea to me; not about her feeling for you—or yours for her.'

There was a pause after this, and then Gerald got out: 'I say—Helen!' on a long breath, staring at her. 'You mean——' he stammered a little.

'That you owe it to Althea—just because we had to talk her over once, before you were sure that you wanted to make her your wife—not to discuss her feelings or her relation to you with anybody, now that she is to be your wife. I should think you would see that for yourself, Gerald. I should think you would see that Althea would not marry you if she thought that you were capable of talking her over with me.'

Gerald had flushed deeply and vividly. 'But Helen—with you!' he murmured. It was a helpless appeal, a helpless protest. His whole life seemed to rise up and confront her with the contrast between their reality—his relation and hers—and the relative triviality of this new episode in his life. And there was his error, and there her inexorable opposition; the episode was one no longer; he must not treat it as trivial, a matter for mutual musings and conjectures. His 'With you!' shook Helen's heart; but, looking past him and hard at the fire, she only moved her head in slow, slight, and final negation.

Gerald was silent for a long time, and she knew that he was gazing at her as a dog gazes when some inexorable and inexplicable refusal turns its world to emptiness. And with her pain for his pain came the rising of old anger and old irony against him; for whose fault was it that even the bitter joy of perfect freedom was cut off? Who had been so blind as not to see that a wife must, in common loyalty, bring circumspection and a careful drawing of limits? Who was it who, in his folly, had not known that his impulsive acquiescence, his idle acceptance of the established comfort and order held out to him, had cut away half of their friendship? Absurd for Gerald, now, to feel reproach and injury. For when he spoke again it was, though in careful tones, with uncontrollable reproach. 'You know, Helen, I never expected this. I don't know that I'd have been able to face this——' He checked himself; already he had learned something of what was required of him. 'It's like poisoning part of my life for me.'

Helen did not allow the bitter smile to curl her lips; her inner rejoinder answered him with: 'Whose fault is it that all my life is poisoned?'

'After all,' said Gerald, and now with a tremor in his voice, 'an old friend—a friend like you—a more than sister—is nearer than any new claims.' She had never heard Gerald's voice break before—for anything to do with her, at least—and she felt that her cheek whitened in hearing it; but she was able to answer in the same even tones: 'I don't think so. No one can be near enough to talk about your wife with you.'

He then turned his back and looked for a long time into the fire. She guessed that there were tears in his eyes, and that he was fighting with anger, pain, and amazement, and the knowledge filled her with cruel joy and with a torturing pity. She longed to tell him that she hated him, and she longed to put her arms around him and to comfort him—comfort him because he was going to marry some one else, and must be loyal to the woman preferred as wife. It was she, however, who first recovered herself. She got up and pinched a withered flower from the fine azalea that Franklin Kane had sent her the day before, and, dropping it into the waste-paper basket, she said at last, very resolutely, 'Come, Gerald, don't be silly.'

He showed her now the face of a miserable, sulky boy, and Helen, smiling at him, went on: 'We have a great many other subjects of conversation, you will recollect. We can still talk about all the things we used to talk about. Sit down, and don't look like that, or I shall be angry with you.'

She knew her power over him; it was able to deceive him as to their real situation, and this was to have obeyed pity, not anger. Half unwillingly he smiled a little, and, rubbing his hand through his hair and sinking into a chair, he said: 'Laugh at me if you feel like it; I'm ill-used.'

'Terribly ill-used, indeed,' said Helen. 'I shall go on laughing at you while you are so ridiculous. Now tell me about the ball at the Fanshawes, and who was there, and who was the prettiest woman in the room.'



CHAPTER XXI.

Althea had intended to fix the time of her marriage for the end of November; but, not knowing quite why, she felt on her return to England that she would prefer a slightly more distant date. It might be foolish to give oneself more time for uneasy meditation, yet it might be wise to give oneself more time for feeling the charm. The charm certainly worked. While Gerald opened his innocent, yet so intelligent eyes, rallied her on her dejection, called her a dear little goose, and kissed her in saying it, she had known that however much he might hurt her she was helplessly in love with him. In telling him that she would marry him just before Christmas—they were to have their Christmas in the Riviera—she didn't intend that he should be given more opportunities for hurting her, but more opportunities for charming her. Helplessly as she might love, her heart was a tremulously careful one; it could not rush recklessly to a goal nor see the goal clearly when pain intervened. It was not now actual pain or doubt it had to meet, but it was that mist of confusion, wonder, and wistfulness; it needed to be dispersed, and Gerald, she felt sure, would disperse it. Gerald, after a questioning lift of his eyebrows, acquiesced very cheerfully in the postponement. After all, they really didn't know each other very well; they would shake down into each other's ways all the more quickly, after marriage, for the wisdom gained by a longer engagement. He expressed these reasonable resignations to Althea, who smiled a little wanly over them.

She was now involved in the rush of new impressions. They were very crowded. She was to have but a fortnight of London and then, accompanied by Mrs. Peel and Sally, to go to Merriston for another fortnight or so before coming back to London for final preparations. Gerald was to be at Merriston for part of the time, and Miss Harriet Robinson was coming over from Paris to sustain and guide her through the last throes of her trousseau. Already every post brought solemn letters from Miss Robinson filled with detailed questionings as to the ordering of lingerie. So it was really in this fortnight of London that she must gain her clearest impression of what her new environment was to be; there would be no time later on.

There were two groups of impressions that she felt herself, rather breathlessly, observing; one group was made by Helen and Franklin and herself, and one by Gerald's friends and relatives, with Gerald himself as a bright though uncertain centre to it.

Gerald's friends and relations were all very nice to her and all very charming people. She had never, she thought, met so many people at once to whom the term might be applied. Their way of dressing, their way of talking, their way of taking you, themselves, and everything so easily, seemed as nearly perfect, as an example of human achievement, as could well be. Life passed among them would assuredly be a life of gliding along a sunny, unruffled stream. If there were dark things or troubled things to deal with, they were kept well below the shining surface; on the surface one always glided. It was charming, indeed, and yet Althea looked a little dizzily from side to side, as if at familiar but unattainable shores, and wondered if some solid foothold on solid earth were not preferable. She wondered if she would not rather walk than glide, and under the gliding she caught glimpses, now and then, of her own dark wonders. They were all very nice to her; but it was as Gerald's wife that they were nice to her; she herself counted for nothing with them. They were frivolous people for the most part, though some among them were serious, and often the most frivolous were those from whom she would have expected gravity, and the serious those whom, on a first meeting, she had thought perturbingly frivolous. Some of the political friends—one who was in the Cabinet, for instance—seemed to think more about hunting and bridge than about their functions in the State; while an aunt of Gerald's, still young and very pretty, wrote articles on philosophy and was ardently interested in ethical societies, in spite of the fact that she rouged her cheeks, wore clothes so fashionable as to look recondite, and had a reputation perfectly presentable for social uses, but not exempt from private whispers. Althea caught such whispers with particular perturbation. The question of morals was one that she had imagined herself to face with a cosmopolitan tolerance; but she now realised that to live among people whose code, in this respect, seemed one of manners only, was a very different thing from reading about them or seeing them from afar, as it were, in foreign countries. Gerald's friends and relatives were anything rather than Bohemian, and most of them were flawlessly respectable; but they were also anything but unworldly; they were very worldly, and, from the implied point of view of all of them, what didn't come out in the world it didn't concern anybody to recognise—except in whispers. It all resolved itself, in the case of people one disapproved of, into a faculty for being nice to them without really having anything to do with them; and to poor Althea this was a difficult task to undertake; social life, in her experience, was more involved in the life of the affections and matched it more nearly. She found, when the fortnight was over, that she was glad, very glad, to get away to Merriston. The comparative solitude would do her good, she felt, and in it, above all, the charm would perhaps work more restoringly than in London. She had been, through everything, more aware than of any new impression that the old one held firm; but, in that breathless fortnight, she found that the charm, persistently, would not be to her what she had hoped it might be. It did not revive her; it did not lift and glorify her; rather it subjugated her and held her helpless and in thrall. She was not crowned with beams; rather, it seemed to her in moments of dizzy insight, dragged at chariot wheels. And more than once her pride revolted as she was whirled along.

It was at Merriston, installed, apparently, so happily with her friends, that the second group of impressions became clearer for her than it had been in London, when she had herself made part of it—the group that had to do with Helen, Franklin, and herself. In London, among all the wider confusions, this smaller but more intense one had not struck her as it did seeing it from a distance. Perhaps it had been because Franklin, among all that glided, had been the raft she stood upon, that, in his company, she had not felt to the full how changed was their relation. His devotion to her was unchanged; of that she was sure. Franklin had not altered; it was she who had altered, and she had now to look at him from the new angle where her own choice had placed her. Seen from this angle it was clear that Franklin could no longer offer just the same devotion, however truly he might feel it; she had barred that out; and it was also clear that he would continue to offer the devotion that she had left it open to him to offer; but here came the strange confusion—this devotion, this remnant, this all that could still be given, hardly differed in practice from the friendship now so frankly bestowed upon Helen as well as upon herself; and, for a further strangeness, Franklin, whom she had helplessly seen as passing from her life, no longer counting in it, was not gone at all; he was there, indeed, as never before, with the background of his sudden millions to give him significance. Franklin was, indeed, as firmly ensconced in this new life that she had entered as he chose to be, and did he not, as a matter of fact, count in it for more than she did? If it was confusing to look at Franklin from the angle of her own withdrawal, what was it to see him altered, for the world, from drab to rose-colour and to see that people were running after him? This fantastic result of wealth, Althea, after a stare or two, was able to accept with other ironic acceptations; it was not indeed London's vision of Franklin that altered him for her, though it confused her; no, what had altered him more than anything she could have thought possible, was Helen's new seeing of him. Helen, she knew quite well, still saw Franklin, pleasantly and clearly, as drab-colour, still, it was probable, saw him as funny; but it was evident that Helen had come to feel fond of him, if anything so detached could be called fondness. He could hardly count for anything with her—after all, who did?—but she liked him, she liked him very much, and it amused her to watch him adjust himself to his new conditions. She took him about with her in London and showed him things and people, ironically smiling, no doubt, and guarding even while she exposed. And Helen wouldn't do this unless she had come to see something more than drab-colour and oddity, and whatever the more might be it was not the millions. No, sitting in the drawing-room at Merriston, with its memories of the two emotional climaxes of her life, Althea, with a sinking heart, felt sure that she had lost something, and that she only knew it lost from seeing that Helen had found it. It had been through Helen's blindness to the qualities in Franklin which, timidly, tentatively, she had put before her, that his worth had grown dim to herself; this was the cutting fact that Althea tried to edge away from, but that her sincerity forced her again and again to examine. It was through Helen's appreciation that she now saw more in Franklin than she had ever seen before. If he was funny he was also original, full of his own underivative flavour; if he was drab-colour, he was also beautiful. Althea recalled the benignity of Helen's eyes as they dwelt upon him, her smile, startled, almost touched, when some quaint, telling phrase revealed him suddenly as an unconscious torch-bearer in a dusky, self-deceiving world. Helen and Franklin were akin in that; they elicited, they radiated truth, and Althea recalled, too, how their eyes would sometimes meet in silence when they both saw the same truth simultaneously. Not that Helen's truth was often Franklin's; they were as alien as ever in their outlook, of this Althea was convinced; but though the outlook was so different, the faculty of sight was the same in both—clear, unperturbed, and profoundly independent. They were neither of them dusky or self-deceived. And what was she? Sitting in the drawing-room at Merriston and thinking it all over, Althea asked herself the question while her heart sank to a deeper dejection. Not only had she lost Franklin; she had lost herself. She embarked on the dangerous and often demoralising search for a definite, recognisable personality—something to lean on with security, a standard and a prop. With growing dismay she could find only a sorry little group of shivering hopes and shaken adages. What was she? Only a well-educated nonentity with, for all coherence and purpose in life, a knowledge of art and literature and a helpless feeling for charm. Poor Althea was rapidly sinking to the nightmare stage of introspection; she saw, fitfully, not restoringly, that it was nightmare, and dragging herself away from these miserable dissections, fixed her eyes on something not herself, on the thing that, after all, gave her, even to the nightmare vision, purpose and meaning. If it were only that, let her, at all events, cling to it; the helpless feeling for charm must then shape her path. Gerald was coming, and to be subjugated was, after all, better than to disintegrate.

She drove down to meet him in the little brougham that was now established in the stables. It was a wet, chilly day. Althea, wrapped in furs, leaned in a corner and looked with an unseeing gaze at the dripping hedgerows and grey sky. She fastened herself in anticipation on the approaching brightness. Ah, to warm herself at the light of his untroubled, unquestioning, unexacting being, to find herself in him. If he would love her and charm her, that, after all, was enough to give her a self.

He was a little late, and Althea did not feel willing to face a public meeting on the platform. She remained sitting in her corner, listening for the sound of the approaching train. When it had arrived, she heard Gerald's voice before she saw him, and the sound thrilled through her deliciously. He was talking to a neighbour, and he paused for some moments to chat with him. Then his head appeared at the window, little drops of rain on his crisp hair, his eyes smiling, yet, as she saw in a moment, less at her in particular than at the home-coming of which she was a part. 'Yes,' he turned to the porter to say, 'the portmanteau outside, the dressing-case in here.' The door was opened and he stepped in beside her. 'Hello, Althea!' He smiled at her again, while he drew a handful of silver from his pocket and picked out a sixpence for the porter. 'Here; all right.' The brougham rolled briskly out of the station yard. They were in the long up-hill lanes. 'Well, how are you, dear?' he asked.

Althea was trembling, but she was controlling herself; she had all the pain and none of the advantage of the impulsive, emotional woman; consciousness of longing made instinctive appeal impossible. 'Very well, thank you,' she smiled, as quietly as he.

'What a beastly day!' said Gerald, looking out. 'You can't imagine London. It's like breathing in a wet blanket. The clean air is a comfort, at all events.'

'Yes,' smiled Althea.

'Old Morty Finch is coming down in time for dinner,' Gerald went on. 'I met him on my way to the station and asked him. Such a good fellow—you remember him? He won't be too many, will he?'

'Indeed no.'

Gerald leaned back, drew the rug up about his knees, and folded his arms, looking at her, still with his generally contented smile. 'And your guests are happy? You're enjoying yourself? Miss Arlington plays the violin, you said. I'm looking forward to hearing her—and seeing her again, too; she is such a very pretty girl.'

'Isn't she?' said Althea. And now, as they rolled on between the dripping hedges, she knew that the trembling of hope and fear was gone, and that a sudden misery, like that of the earth and sky, had settled upon her. He had not kissed her. He did not even take her hand. Oh, why did he not kiss her? why did he not know that she wanted love and comfort? Only her pride controlled the cry.

Gerald looked out of the window and seemed to find everything very pleasant. 'I went to the play last night,' he said. 'Kane took a party of us—Helen, Miss Buchanan, Lord Compton, and Molly Fanshawe. What a good sort he is, Kane; a real character.'

'You didn't get at him at all in the summer, did you?' said Althea, in her deadened voice.

'No,' said Gerald reflectively, 'not at all; and I don't think that I get much more at him now, you know; but I see more what's in him; he is so extraordinarily kind and he takes his money so nicely. And, O Lord! how he is being run after! He really has millions, you know; the mothers are all at his traces trying to track him down, and he is as cheerful and as unconcerned as you please.' Gerald suddenly smiled round at her again. 'I say, Althea, don't you regret him sometimes? It would have been a glorious match, you know.'

Althea felt herself growing pale. 'Regret him!' she said, and, for her, almost violently, the opportunity was an outlet for her wretchedness; 'I can't conceive how a man's money can make any difference. I couldn't have married Franklin if he'd been a king!'

'Oh, my dear!' said Gerald, startled; 'I didn't mean it seriously, of course.'

'It seems to me,' said Althea, trying to control her labouring breath, 'that over here you take nothing quite so seriously as that—great matches, I mean, and money.'

Gerald was silent for a moment; then, in a very courteous voice he said: 'Have I offended you in any way, Althea?'

Tears stood in her eyes; she turned away her head to hide them. 'Yes, you have,' she said, and the sound of her voice shocked her, it so contradicted the crying out of her disappointed heart.

But though Gerald was blind on occasions that did not seem to him to warrant any close attention, he was clear-sighted on those that did. He understood that something was amiss; and though her exclamation had, indeed, made him angry for a moment, he was now sorry; he felt that she was unhappy, and he couldn't bear people to be unhappy. 'I've done something that displeases you,' he said, taking her hand and leaning forward to look into her eyes, half pleading and half rallying her in the way she knew so well. 'Do forgive me.'

She longed to put her head on his shoulder and sob: 'I wanted you to love me'; but that would have been to abase herself too much; yet the tears fell as she answered, trying to smile: 'It was only that you hurt me; even in jest I cannot bear to have you say that I could have been so sordid.'

He pressed her hand. 'I was only in fun, of course. Please forgive me.'

She knew, with all his gay solicitude, his gentle self-reproach, that she had angered and perplexed him, that she made him feel a little at a loss with her talk of sordidness, that, perhaps, she wearied him. And, seeing this, she was frightened—frightened, and angry that she should be afraid. But fear predominated, and she forced herself to smile at him and to talk with him during the long drive, as though nothing had happened.



CHAPTER XXII.

Some days after Gerald had gone to Merriston, Franklin Kane received a little note from old Miss Buchanan. Helen, too, had gone to the country until Monday, as she had told Franklin when he had asked her to see some pictures with him on Saturday. Franklin had felt a little bereft, especially since, hoping for her on Saturday, he had himself refused an invitation. But he did not miss that; the invitations that poured in upon him, like a swelling river, were sources of cheerful amusement to him. He, too, was acquiring his little ironies and knew why they poured in. It was not the big house-party where he would have been a fish out of water—even though in no sense a fish landed—that he missed; he missed Helen; and he wouldn't think of going to see pictures without her. It was, therefore, pleasant to read Miss Buchanan's hospitable suggestion that he should drop in that afternoon for a cup of tea and to keep an old woman company. He was very glad indeed to keep Miss Buchanan company. She interested him greatly; he had not yet in the least made out what was her object in life, whether she had gained or missed it, and whether, indeed, she had ever had one to gain or miss. People who went thus unpiloted through life filled him with wonder and conjecture.

He found Miss Buchanan as he had found her on the occasion of his first visit to the little house in Belgravia. Her acute and rugged face showed not much greater softening for this now wonted guest—showed, rather, a greater acuteness; but any one who knew Miss Buchanan would know from its expression that she liked Franklin Kane. 'Well,' she said, as he drew his chair to the opposite side of the tea-table—very cosy it was, the fire shining upon them, and the canaries trilling intermittently—'Well, here we are, abandoned. We'll make the best of it, won't we?'

Franklin said that under the circumstances he couldn't feel at all abandoned. 'Nor do I,' said Miss Buchanan, filling the tea-pot. 'You and I get on very well together, I consider.' Franklin thought so too.

'I hope we may go on with it,' said Miss Buchanan, leaning back in her chair while the tea drew. 'I hope we are going to keep you over here. You've given up any definite idea of going back, I suppose.'

Franklin was startled by this confident assurance. His definite idea in coming over had been, of course, to go back at the end of the autumn, unless, indeed, a certain cherished hope were fulfilled, in which case Althea should have decided on any movements. He had hardly, till this moment, contemplated his own intentions, and now that he did so he found that he had been guided by none that were definable. It was not because he had suddenly grown rich and, in his funny way, the fashion, that he thus stayed on in London, working hard, it is true, and allowing no new developments to interfere with his work, yet making no plans and setting no goal before himself. To live as he had been living for the past weeks was, indeed, in a sense, to drift. There was nothing Franklin disapproved of more than of drifting; therefore he was startled when Miss Buchanan's remarks brought him to this realisation. 'Well, upon my word, Miss Buchanan,' he said, 'I hadn't thought about it. No—of course not—of course, I've not given up the idea of going back. I shall go back before very long. But things have turned up, you see. There is Althea's wedding—I must be at that—and there's Miss Helen. I want to see as much of her as I can before I go home, get my friendship firmly established, you know.'

Miss Buchanan now poured out the tea and handed Franklin his cup. 'I shouldn't think about going yet, then,' she observed. 'London is an admirable place for the sort of work you are interested in, and I entirely sympathise with your wish to see as much as you can of Helen.' She added, after a little pause in which Franklin, still further startled to self-contemplation, wondered whether it was work, Althea's wedding, or Helen who had most kept him in London,—'I'm troubled about Helen; she's not looking at all well; hasn't been feeling well all the summer. I trace it to that attack of influenza she had in Paris when she met Miss Jakes.'

Franklin's thoughts were turned from himself. He looked grave. 'I'm afraid she's delicate,' he said.

'There is nothing sickly about her, but she is fragile,' said Miss Buchanan. 'She can't stand wear and tear. It might kill her.'

Franklin looked even graver. The thought of his friend killed by wear and tear was inexpressibly painful to him. He remembered—he would never forget—the day in the woods, Helen's 'I'm sick to death of it.' That Helen had a secret sorrow, and that it was preying upon her, he felt sure, and there was pride for him in the thought that he could help her there; he could help her to hide it; even her aunt didn't know that she was sick to death of it. 'What do you suggest might be done?' he now inquired. 'Do you think she goes out too much? Perhaps a rest-cure.'

'No; I don't think she over-tires herself; she doesn't go out nearly as much as she used to. There is nothing to cure and nothing to rest from. It isn't so much now; I'm here now to make things possible for her. It's after I'm gone. I'm an old woman; I'm devoted to my niece, and I don't see what's to become of her when I'm dead.'

If Franklin had been startled before, he was shocked now. He had never given much thought to the economic basis of Helen's life, taking it for granted that though she would like more money, she had, and always would have, quite enough to live on happily. The idea of an insecure future for her had never entered his head. He now knew that, for all his theories of the independence of women, it was quite intolerable to contemplate an insecure future for Helen. Some women might have it in them to secure themselves—she was not one of them. She was a flower in a vase; if the vase were taken away the flower would simply lie where it fell and wither. He had put down his tea-cup while Miss Buchanan spoke, and he sat gazing at her. 'Isn't Miss Helen provided for?' he asked.

'Yes, in a sense she is,' said Miss Buchanan, who, after drinking her tea, did not go on to her muffin, but still leaned back with folded arms, her deep-set, small grey eyes fixed on Franklin's face. 'I've seen to that as best I could; but one can't save much out of a small annuity. Helen, after my death, will have an income of L150 a year. It isn't enough. You have only to look at Helen to see that it isn't enough. She's not fit to scrape and manage on that.'

Franklin repeated the sum thoughtfully. 'Well, no, perhaps not,' he half thought, only half agreed; 'not leading the kind of life she does now. If she could only work at something as well; bring in a little more like that.' But Miss Buchanan interrupted him.

'Nonsense, my dear man; what work is there—work that will bring in money—for a decorative, untrained idler like Helen? And what time would she have left to live the only life she's fit to lead if she had to make money? I'm not worried about bare life for Helen; I'm worried about what kind of life it's to be. Helen was brought up to be an idler and to make a good marriage—like most girls of her class—and she hasn't made it, and she's not likely to make it now.'

'One hundred and fifty pounds isn't enough,' said Franklin, still thoughtfully, 'for a decorative idler.'

'That's just it,' Miss Buchanan acquiesced; and she went on after a moment, 'I'm willing to call Helen a decorative idler if we are talking of purely economic weights and measures; thank goodness there are other standards, and we are not likely to see them eliminated from civilised society for many a generation. For many a generation, I trust, there'll be people in the world who don't earn their keep, as one may say, and yet who are more worth while keeping than most of the people who do. To my mind Helen is such a person. I'd like to tell you a little about her life, Mr. Kane.'

'I should be very much obliged if you would,' Franklin murmured, his thin little face taking on an expression of most intense concentration. 'It would be a great privilege. You know what I feel about Miss Helen.'

'Yes; it's because I know what you feel about her that I want to tell you,' said Miss Grizel. 'Not that it's anything startling, or anything you wouldn't have supposed for yourself; but it illustrates my point, I think, very well, my point that Helen is the type of person we can't afford to let go under. Has Helen ever spoken to you about her mother?'

'Never,' said Franklin, his intent face expressing an almost ritualistic receptivity.

'Well, she's a poor creature,' said Miss Buchanan, 'a poor, rubbishy creature; the most selfish and reckless woman I know. I warned my brother how it would turn out from the first; but he was infatuated and had his way, and a wretched way it turned out. She made him miserable, and she made the children miserable, and she nearly ruined him with her extravagance; he and I together managed to put things straight, and see to it that Nigel should come into a property not too much encumbered and that Helen should inherit a little sum, enough to keep her going—a little more it was, as a matter of fact, than what I'll be able to leave her. Well, when my brother died, she was of age and she came into her modest fortune; for a young girl, with me to back her up, it wasn't bad. She had hardly seen her mother for three years—they'd always been at daggers drawn—when one day, up in Scotland, when she was with her brother—it was before Nigel married—who should appear but Daisy. She had travelled up there in desperate haste to throw herself on her children's mercy. She was in terrible straits. She had got into debt—cards and racing—and she was frightfully involved with some horror of a man. Her honour was wrecked unless she could pay her debts and extricate herself. Well, she found no mercy in Nigel; he refused to give her a farthing. It was Helen who stripped herself of every penny she possessed and saved her. I don't know whether she touched Helen's pity, or whether it was mere family pride; the thought of the horror of a man was probably a strong motive too. All Helen ever said about it to me was, "How could I bear to see her like that?" So, she ruined herself. Of course after that it was more than ever necessary that she should marry. I hadn't begun to save for her, and there was nothing else for her to look to. Of course I expected her to marry at once; she was altogether the most charming girl of her day. But there is the trouble; she never did. She refused two most brilliant offers, one after the other, and hosts of minor ones. There was some streak of girlish romance in her, I suppose. I wish I could have been more on the spot and put on pressure. But it was difficult to be on the spot. Helen never told me about her offers until long after; and pressure with her wouldn't come to much. Of course I didn't respect her the less for her foolishness. But, dear me, dear me,' said Miss Buchanan, turning her eyes on the fire, 'what a pity it has all been, what a pity it is, to see her wasted.'

Franklin listened to this strange tale, dealing with matters to him particularly strange, such as gambling, dishonoured mothers, horrors of men and mercenary marriages. It all struck him as very dreadful; it all sank into him; but it didn't oppress him in its strangeness; no outside fact, however dreadful, ever oppressed Franklin. What did oppress him was the thought of Helen in it all. This oppressed him very much.

Miss Buchanan continued to look into the fire for a little while after she had finished her story, and then, bringing her eyes back to Franklin's countenance, she looked at him keenly and steadily. 'And now, Mr. Kane,' she said, 'you are perhaps asking yourself why I tell you all this?'

Franklin was not asking it at all, and he answered with earnest sincerity: 'Why, no; I think I ought to be told. I want to be told everything about my friends that I may hear. I'm glad to know this, because it makes me feel more than ever what a fine woman Miss Helen is, and I'm sorry, because she's wasted, as you say. I only wish,' said Franklin, and the intensity of cogitation deepened on his face, 'I only wish that one could think out some plan to give her a chance.'

'I wish one could,' said Miss Buchanan. And without any change of voice she added: 'I want you to marry her, Mr. Kane.'

Franklin sat perfectly still and turned his eyes on her with no apparent altering of expression, unless the arrested stillness of his look was alteration. His eyes and Miss Buchanan's plunged deep into each other's, held each other's for a long time. Then, slowly, deeply, Franklin flushed.