lation; she had never been so near it. She had not again allowed him to
kiss her--she was still rather ashamed when she remembered how often she
had, on that one occasion, allowed him to kiss her; yet, in spite of her
swift stepping back to discretion, she had never in all her life been so
near to saying 'yes' to Franklin as during the eight or ten days after
his arrival. And the fact that a third postcard from Helen expressed
even further vagueness as to the chance of Gerald's being able to be
with them that autumn at Merriston, added to the sense of inevitability.
Althea had been for this time so absorbed in Franklin, his effect on
others and on herself, that she had not felt, as she would otherwise
have done, Helen's unsatisfactory attitude. Helen was at last coming,
and she was fluttered at the thought of her coming, but she was far more
able to cope with Helen; there was more self to do it with; she was
stronger, more independent of Helen's opinion and of Helen's affection.
But dimly she felt also--hardly aware she felt it--that she was a more
effective self as the undecided recipient of Franklin's devotion than as
his affianced wife. A rayless person, it seemed, could crown one with
beams as long as one maintained one's distance from him; merged with him
one shared his insignificance. To accept Franklin might be to shear them
both of all the radiance they borrowed from each other.

Helen arrived on a very hot evening in mid-August. She had lost the best
train, which brought one to Merriston at tea-time--Althea felt that
Helen was the sort of person who would always lose the best train--and
after a tedious journey, with waits and changes at hot stations, she
received her friend's kisses just as the dressing-bell for dinner
sounded. Helen, standing among her boxes, while Amelie hurriedly got out
her evening things, looked extremely tired, and felt, Althea was sure,
extremely ill-tempered. It was characteristic of Helen, she knew it
intuitively, to feel ill-temper, and yet to have it so perfectly under
control that it made her manner sweeter than usual. Her sense of social
duty never failed her, and it did not in the least fail her now as she
smiled at Althea, and, while she drank the cup of tea that had been
brought to her, gave an account of her misfortunes. She had arrived in
London from Scotland the night before, spent two hours of the morning in
frantic shopping--the shops like ovens and the London pavements exhal