nd drew long breaths. She was becoming terribly overwrought. It
had been, since so long, a second nature to live two lives that any
danger of their merging affected her with a dreadful feeling of
disintegration. There was the life of comradeship, the secure little
compartment where Gerald was at home, so at home that he could tell her
she was perfect and touch her scarf with an approving hand, and from
this familiar shelter she had looked for so long, with the calmest eye,
upon his flirtations, and in it had heard, unmoved, his encomiums upon
herself. The other life, the real life, was all outdoors in comparison;
it was all her real self, passionate, untamed, desolate; it was like a
bleak, wild moorland, and the social, the comrade self only a strongly
built little lodge erected, through stress of wind and weather, in the
midst of it. Since girlhood it had been a second nature to her to keep
comradeship shut in and reality shut out. And to-night reality seemed to
shake and batter at the doors.

She had come to Merriston House to rest, to drink _eau rougie_ and to
rest. She wanted to lapse into apathy and to recover, as far as might
be, from her recent unpleasant experiments and experiences. Had she
allowed herself any illusions about the experiment, the experience would
have been humiliating; but Helen was not humiliated, she had not
deceived herself for a moment. She had, open-eyed, been trying for the
'other things,' and she had only just missed them. She had intended to
marry a very important person who much admired her. She had been almost
sure that she could marry him if she wanted to, and she had found out
that she couldn't. It had not been, as in her youth, her own shrinking
and her own recoil at the last decisive moment. She had been resolved
and unwavering; her discomfiture had been sudden and its cause the quite
grotesque one of her admirer having fallen head over heels in love with
a child of eighteen--a foolish, affected little child, who giggled and
glanced and blushed opportunely, and who, beside these assets, had a
skilful and determined mother. Without the mother to waylay, pounce, and
fix, Helen did not believe that her sober, solid friend would have
yielded to the momentary beguilement, and Helen herself deigned not one
hint of contest; she had been resolved, but only to accept; she could
never have waylaid or pounced. And now, apathetic, yet irritated,
exhausted and sick at heart, she had been telling