shaken with the throes
of desperate hope. Only in these last years, when next best things were
no longer so plentiful, had hope really died. Her heart still beat, but
it seemed to beat thinly, among all the heaped-up ashes of dead hopes.
She was free to go forth into the sunless world and choose what place
should be hers. She did not care much for anything that world had to
give her. But she intended to choose carefully and calmly. She was aware
in herself of firm, well-knit faculty, of tastes, sharp and sensitive,
demanding only an opportunity to express themselves in significant and
finished forms of life; and though Helen did not think of it in these
terms, saying merely to herself that she wanted money and power, the
background of her intention was a consciousness of capacity for power.
Reflecting on this power, and on the paths to its realisation, she was
led far, indeed, from any thought of Althea; and Althea was not at all
in her mind as, sleepy at last, and very weary, she remembered Gerald's
last words. It was the thought of Gerald that brought the thought of
Althea, and of Althea's pages. Fair and empty they were, she felt sure,
adorned only here and there with careful and becoming maxims. She smiled
a little, not untenderly, as she thought of Althea. But, just before
sinking to deeper drowsiness, and deciding that she must rouse herself
and go upstairs to bed, a further consciousness came to her. The sunny
day at Merriston had not, in her thoughts, brought them near to one
another--Gerald, and Althea, and her; yet something significant ran
through her sudden memory of it. She had moments of her race's sense of
second-sight, and it never came without making her aware of a pause--a
strange, forced pause--where she had to look at something, touch
something, in the dark, as it were. It was there as she roused herself
from her half-somnolent state; it was there in the consciousness of a
turning-point in her life--in Gerald's, in Althea's. 'We may write
something on Althea's pages,' was the thought with which, smiling over
its inappropriateness, she went upstairs. And the fancy faded from her
memory, as if it had been a bird's wing that brushed her cheek in the
darkness.

CHAPTER IX.

Althea went down to Merriston House in the middle of July. Helen
accompanied her to see her safely installed and to set the very torpid
social ball rolling. There were not many neighbours, but Helen assembled
them all. She h