aching; but above everything else one hot feeling
pulsed: Helen should not have said that he was funny and then glided to
the point where she left him as too high for herself, yet not too high
for her friend. She should not have withdrawn from her friend and
stranded her with Franklin Winslow Kane.

CHAPTER XI.

In the course of the next few days Miss Buckston went back to her Surrey
cottage, and two friends of Helen's arrived. Helen was fulfilling her
promise of giving Althea all the people she wanted. Lady Pickering was
widowed, young, coquettish, and pretty; Sir Charles Brewster a lively
young bachelor with high eyebrows, upturned tips to his moustache, and
an air of surprise and competence. They made great friends at once with
Mildred, Dorothy and Herbert Vaughan, who shared in all Sir Charles's
hunting and yachting interests. Lady Pickering, after a day of tennis
and flirtation, would drift at night into Dorothy and Mildred's rooms to
talk of dresses, and for some days wore her hair tied in a large black
bow behind, reverting, however, to her usual dishevelled
picturesqueness. 'One needs to look as innocent as a pony to have that
bow really suit one,' she said.

Althea, in this accession of new life, again felt relegated to the
background. Helen did not join in the revels, but there was no air of
being relegated about her; she might have been the jaded and kindly
queen before whom they were enacted. 'Dear Helen,' said Lady Pickering
to Mildred and Althea, 'I can see that she's down on her luck and very
bored with life. But it's always nice having her about, isn't it? Always
nice to have her to look at.'

Althea felt that her guests found no such decorative uses for herself,
and that they took it for granted that, with a suitor to engage her
attention, she would be quite satisfied to remain outside, even if
above, the gayer circle. She could not deny that her acceptance of
Franklin's devotion before Helen's arrival, their air of happy
withdrawal--a withdrawal that had then made them conspicuous, not
negligible--absolutely justified her guests in their over-tactfulness.
They still took it for granted that she and Franklin wanted to be alone
together; they still left them in an isolation almost bridal; but now
Althea did not want to be left alone with Franklin, and above all wished
to detach herself from any bridal association; and she tormented herself
with accusations concerning her former graciousness,