quite adequate. She
was the sort of girl who wouldn't care for sentiment. He honestly
believed she would write back sensibly and just say "Yes."

It is to be remarked that no question remained as to posting the letter
or not, so soon as it was finished. He had begun it to see how it
looked: now he felt that it was something fated. He must see what
happened. Without waiting even to put on a hat, he hurried out to an
adjacent pillar-box and dropped the letter in with hardly more emotion
than if it had been an ordinary bill.

* * * * *

Going up to bed, without repentance for the night's wild work, and in
fact oddly calm for any one in his position, he heard a curious noise
inside his sister's room.

He stopped and listened at the door.

She was obviously sobbing.

Hubert suddenly felt softened towards her. So she cared, after all!
She felt the separation after these long years!

Had he sometimes wronged her? Had he been impatient? Was she really
fond of him; trying to consult his wishes and not to irritate him? Was
he growing selfish?...

He very nearly tapped and went in to console her. Then he reflected
that she almost certainly would engineer another scene, and that always
gave him a bad night.

CHAPTER III

"WHY WOMEN WED"

Helena had never thought much about marriage. There was no reason
indeed why she should, for she was young and to her it still appeared,
like death to a small child, as something she was sure to reach some
day but need not worry with just now.

She was, in fact, nineteen, but her ideas were those of nineteen fifty
years ago or of fourteen to-day. Devonshire, for one thing, has slept
on in its soft air, not much disturbed by any modern turmoil; and for
another, Helena's mother had ideas. These, briefly put, consisted in
not letting her daughter have any.

It is, however, only human, from Eve downwards, to defy authority and
search for knowledge. Helena, knowing that it was her lot to marry,
naturally felt some interest in the habit. Whenever she came on
allusions to it, she stocked them in her brain, all in a healthy and
quite natural way, wondering in an abstract manner whether it would be
thus or thus with her. She never dared to talk about it to her mother.
She had once mentioned her own hypothetic marriage, only to be told
that girls did not speak of such things in fun, and it would be quite
time enough when the occasion rose, an