d darkness closed with it on the gallery.

"A man would need to keep his head with that girl!" thought Captain
Lodge, with tantalized amusement. "But, my hat, what a beauty!"

Meanwhile in the library downstairs a good deal of thinking was going on.
Lord Buntingford was taking more serious stock of his new duties than he
had done yet. As he walked, smoking, up and down, his thoughts were full
of his poor little cousin Rachel Pitstone. She had always been a
favourite of his; and she had always known him better than any other
person among his kinsfolk. He had found it easy to tell her secrets, when
nobody else could have dragged a word from him; and as a matter of fact
she had known before she died practically all that there was to know
about him. And she had been so kind, and simple and wise. Had she perhaps
once had a _tendresse_ for him--before she met Ned Pitstone?--and if
things had gone--differently--might he not, perhaps, have married her?
Quite possibly. In any case the bond between them had always been one of
peculiar intimacy; and in looking back on it he had nothing to reproach
himself with. He had done what he could to ease her suffering life.
Struck down in her prime by a mortal disease, a widow at thirty, with her
one beautiful child, her chief misfortune had been the melancholy and
sensitive temperament, which filled the rooms in which she lived as full
of phantoms as the palace of Odysseus in the vision of Theoclymenus.

She was afraid for her child; afraid for her friend; afraid for the
world. The only hope of happiness for a woman, she believed, lay in an
honest lover, if such a lover could be found. Herself an intellectual,
and a freed spirit, she had no trust in any of the new professional and
technical careers into which she saw women crowding. Sex seemed to her
now as always the dominating fact of life. Votes did not matter, or
degrees, or the astonishing but quite irrelevant fact, as the papers
announced it, that women should now be able not only to fit but to plan a
battleship. Love, and a child's clinging mouth, and the sweetness of a
Darby and Joan old age, for these all but the perverted women had always
lived, and would always live.

She saw in her Helena the strong beginnings of sex. But she also realized
the promise of intelligence, of remarkable brain development, and it
seemed to her of supreme importance that sex should have the first
innings in her child's life.

"If she goes to colle