herself, as she lay in
the garden-chairs at Merriston House, that it was more than probable
that the time was over, even for the 'other things.' The prospect made
her weary. What--with Aunt Grizel's one hundred and fifty a year--was
she to do with herself in the future? What was to become of her? She
didn't feel that she much cared, and yet it was all that there was left
to care about, for Aunt Grizel's sake if not for her own, and she felt
only fit to rest from the pressure of the question. To-night, as she
turned and wandered among the trees, she said to herself that it hadn't
been a propitious time to come for rest to Merriston House. Gerald had
been the last person she desired to see just now. She had never been so
near to feeling danger as to-night. If Gerald were nice to her--he
always was--but nice in a certain way, the way that expressed so clearly
his tenderness and his dreadful, his merciful unawareness, she might
break down before him and sob. This would be too horrible, and when she
thought that it might happen she felt, rising with the longing for
tears, an old resentment against Gerald, fierce, absurd, and
unconquerable. After making the round of the lawns and looking up hard
and unseeingly at the stars, she came back to the terrace. Gerald and
Althea were gone, and she surmised that Gerald had not taken much
trouble to be nice. She was passing along an unillumined corner when she
came suddenly upon a figure seated there--so suddenly that she almost
fell against it. She murmured a hasty apology as Mr. Kane rose from a
chair where, with folded arms, he had been seated, apparently in
contemplation of the night.

'Oh, I beg your pardon,' said Helen. 'It's so dark here. I didn't see
you.'

'And I didn't hear you coming,' said Mr. Kane. 'I beg your pardon. I'm
afraid you hurt your foot.'

'Not at all,' Helen assured him. She had stepped into the light from the
windows and, Mr. Kane being beside her, she could see his face clearly
and see that he looked very tired. She had been aware, in these days of
somnolent retirement, that one other member of the party seemed, though
not in her sense retired from it, to wander rather aimlessly on its
outskirts. That his removal to this ambiguous limbo had been the result
of her own arrival Helen had no means of knowing, since she had never
seen Mr. Kane in his brief moment of hope when he and Althea had been
centre and everybody else outskirts. She had found him, during