not help but overhear, his senses being sharpened by
the dread of hearing.

"My poor child" (it was the young girl who spoke), "you don't know
what you want; but you want something more than that."

Durant rattled his color-box in desperation, but the women were too
much absorbed to heed his warning, and Frida even raised her voice
in answering:

"Yes, I'm afraid I do want something more. I know what you're
thinking, Georgie. When women of my age go on like this it generally
means that they're in love, or that they want to be married, or
both."

Durant was considering the propriety of bursting out on them noisily
from the cover of his umbrella, but before he could decide the point
Miss Tancred had continued:

"I am not in love."

She spoke in the tone of one stating an extremely uninteresting
fact.

"You _are_ in love, Frida. You're in love with life, and life won't
have anything to do with you; it's thrown you over, and a beastly
shame, too! You're simply dying for love of it, my sweetheart."

Frida did not deny the accusation. They passed on, and in the
silence Durant could hear their skirts as they brushed the thorn
bush. He could only pray now that he might remain invisible.

He felt rather than saw that they turned their heads in passing.

"Do you think he heard?"

This time it was Miss Chatterton who raised her voice.

"It doesn't matter if he did. He's not a fool, whatever else he is."

Durant overlooked that flattering tribute to himself in his
admiration of Miss Chatterton's masterly analysis and comprehension.
She had, so to speak, taken Frida Tancred to pieces and put her
together again in a phrase--"Dying for love of life." Beside her
luminous intuition his own more logical method seemed clumsy and
roundabout, a constructive process riddled by dangerous fallacies
and undermined by monstrous assumptions. At the same time he
persisted in returning to one of these, the most monstrous, perhaps,
of all. In spite, perhaps because, of her flat denial, he pictured
Frida not only as mysteriously in love with existence, but with a
certain humble spectator of existence. According to the view he had
once expounded to her the two passions were inseparable.

Before very long he received a new light on the subject. It was his
last day, the two cousins were together somewhere, the Colonel was
in bed with a bilious attack, and Durant was alone in the
drawing-room.

He had not been alone long before Miss