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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Yes, sir,' said Thomas.

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

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

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

'Yes, sir.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Haven't you any occupation?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Do you do that?' Helen asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XIII.

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

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

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

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

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

Althea said that she liked it.

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

'Oh, thank you so much.'

'You are fond of flowers?'

'Very fond.'

'Which are your favourites?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Redeem yourself? From what?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Why don't you do it?'

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

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

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

'No; I drift too,' said Althea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What an absurd woman you are.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Wily creature!'

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

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

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

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

'Certainly,' said Althea in chilly tones.

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

'Why should you be serious?' said Althea.

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

'Why should I be angry?'

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

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

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

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

She turned blindly towards the house.

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

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

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

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

'We are friends then, really friends?'

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



CHAPTER XIV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He laughed. 'I suppose I do.'

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

'Well, yes,' he assented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Well, isn't it?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Help you?' Helen rather faltered.

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

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

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

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

'Not in the least.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XVI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Well,' Helen echoed in the darkness.

'It's all settled,' said Gerald.

'Yes,' said Helen.

'And I'm very happy.'

'I am so glad.'

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

'I'm so glad,' Helen repeated.

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

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

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

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

'He told you, dear Helen?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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