put her in his pocket, and she never rolled
any further. He packed her off to England and made her sit in this
dreadful old family seat of his till she died of it. That's the sort
of woman Miss Tancred's mother was, and Miss Tancred takes after her
mother. She's a cosmopolitan, too."

"Rubbish! No woman can be a cosmopolitan." He said it in the same
tone in which he had told Frida that no woman could have a pure
passion for Nature. "And Miss Tancred, though nice, strikes me as
peculiarly provincial. I shouldn't have thought----"

"There are things in her you'd never have thought of. It's wonderful
how she comes out when you know her."

"She certainly has come out wonderfully since you came on the
scene." (The words he used had a familiar ring. It was exactly what
Mrs. Fazakerly had said to him.)

"I? I've not had anything to do with it. It was you; she told me. It
wasn't just that you understood her; you made her understand
herself; you made her feel; you stirred up all the passion in her."

"I don't understand you," he said coldly.

"Well, I think if you can understand Miss Tancred you might
understand _me_. Compared with Frida I'm simplicity itself."

"When did I do these things?"

"Why, when you told her to let herself go. When you showed her your
sketches and talked to her about the places, and the sea, all the
things you had seen; the things she had dreamed of and never seen."

The young girl spoke as if she was indignant with him for reveling
in opportunities that were Frida's by right.

"But she shall see them. She shall go away from this, and be herself
and nobody else in the world."

"It's too late--it's not as if she were young."

"Young? She's a good deal younger than I am, though she's thirty and
I'm twenty-four--twenty-five next September. Frida's young because
she's got the body of a woman, the mind of a man, and the soul of a
baby. She'll begin where other women end, will Frida. Wait till
she's been abroad with me, and you'll see how her soul will come on,
in a more congenial climate."

"Where are you going?"

"We're going everywhere. Venice--Rome--Florence--the
Mediterranean--the regular thing. And to all sorts of queer
outlandish places besides--Scandinavia, the Hebrides, and Iceland;
everywhere that you can go to by sea. The sea----That's you again."

"The deuce it is! I doubt if I've done the kind thing, then. I seem
to have roused passions which will never be satisfied. When she
c