mpts to leave it; twice she crossed to
America and made obscure appearances on the boards, and once she
sojourned in Paris for several months. But all in vain--she _had_ to
go back and sit on her gilded couch. Do you know, I rather like her;
after all, she has never tried to turn to account her connection with
you, Morgan. She's no mere vulgar adventuress. There's something
really taking about her. But I'd like to slap her sisters. When do you
leave for the country?"

"A fortnight hence, I hope," said Morgan. "But I am rather vague about
what immediately is going to follow. In a general way it is understood
that I am to work in the bank, which is precisely what I refused to
do thirteen years ago."

"Thirteen years! That is a good stretch out of a life," said Helen,
with a half sigh, "Time flies. I scarcely realise that I am thirty-six
already. And the years seem to bring nothing but perplexity and
embarrassment at the increase of my fortune. It is perfectly
meaningless and absurd to me, this monstrous fortune. I feel I haven't
any right to it; though, as I derive no happiness from it, that
feeling ought not to give me very much concern. Happiness depends on
one's personal relations with others--a few others, that is--and
though I shake hands with a vast crowd, I have no close personal
relations; not, at least, in the sense in which I understand the
phrase. A sort of subtle fusion must accompany. I should have
preferred to leave my fortune to you, Morgan, but I knew you wouldn't
like to benefit by my death, so I have disposed of it otherwise."

He looked hard at her.

"Why this sudden lugubriousness?" he asked.

"Well," she said enigmatically, and the enigma was repeated in the
accompanying shrug of her shoulders.

He seemed, however, to pierce beyond the smiling placidity of her
expression, and to be aware of something that chilled him, of
something that seemed to say: "There are such things as broken
hearts."

"You've never had the life you deserved to have, Helen," he cried.

"There have been those who have envied me. My biography would read
like a record of every earthly happiness. I am the daughter of a rich
country gentleman with whom I have always been on the best of terms,
only agriculture bores me rather. I was presented to my sovereign at
seventeen. I danced and rode and flirted and was supposed to be having
a good time, and a Baronet thought he fell in love with me, and did
really marry me. I have a