'It makes me look silly, her rejected suitor showing more solicitude than I do--unless it makes him look silly; I rather feel it's that way. But, apart from that, about Althea, I'm really bothered. It's all right, of course; I've brought her round. I laughed at her a little and teased her a little, and told her not to be a dear little goose, you know. But, Helen, deuce take it! the trouble is----' Again Gerald turned and kicked the log, and then, his hands on the mantelpiece, he gazed with frowning intentness into the flames. 'She takes it all so much more seriously than I do,' so he finally brought out his distress; 'so much more seriously than I can, you know. It's all right, of course; only one doesn't know quite how to get on.' And now, turning to Helen, he found her eyes on his, and her silence became significant to him. There was no response in her eyes; they were veiled, mute; they observed him; they told him nothing. And he had a sense, new to him and quite inexpressibly painful, of being shut out. 'I may go on talking to you--about everything--as I have always done, Helen?' he said. It was hardly a question; he couldn't really dream that there was anything not to be talked out with Helen. But there was. Gerald received one of the ugliest shocks of his life when Helen said to him in her careful voice: 'You may not talk about Althea to me; not about her feeling for you--or yours for her.' There was a pause after this, and then Gerald got out: 'I say--Helen!' on a long breath, staring at her. 'You mean----' he stammered a little. 'That you owe it to Althea--just because we had to talk her over once, before you were sure that you wanted to make her your wife--not to discuss her feelings or her relation to you with anybody, now that she is to be your wife. I should think you would see that for yourself, Gerald. I should think you would see that Althea would not marry you if she thought that you were capable of talking her over with me.' Gerald had flushed deeply and vividly. 'But Helen--with _you_!' he murmured. It was a helpless appeal, a helpless protest. His whole life seemed to rise up and confront her with the contrast between their reality--his relation and hers--and the relative triviality of this new episode in his life. And there was his error, and there her inexorable opposition; the episode was one no longer; he must not treat it as trivial, a matter for mutual musings and conjectures. His 'With you!' shook Helen's heart; but, looking past him and hard at the fire, she only moved her head in slow, slight, and final negation.