evident that Helen had come to feel fond of him, if anything so detached could be called fondness. He could hardly count for anything with her--after all, who did?--but she liked him, she liked him very much, and it amused her to watch him adjust himself to his new conditions. She took him about with her in London and showed him things and people, ironically smiling, no doubt, and guarding even while she exposed. And Helen wouldn't do this unless she had come to see something more than drab-colour and oddity, and whatever the more might be it was not the millions. No, sitting in the drawing-room at Merriston, with its memories of the two emotional climaxes of her life, Althea, with a sinking heart, felt sure that she had lost something, and that she only knew it lost from seeing that Helen had found it. It had been through Helen's blindness to the qualities in Franklin which, timidly, tentatively, she had put before her, that his worth had grown dim to herself; this was the cutting fact that Althea tried to edge away from, but that her sincerity forced her again and again to examine. It was through Helen's appreciation that she now saw more in Franklin than she had ever seen before. If he was funny he was also original, full of his own underivative flavour; if he was drab-colour, he was also beautiful. Althea recalled the benignity of Helen's eyes as they dwelt upon him, her smile, startled, almost touched, when some quaint, telling phrase revealed him suddenly as an unconscious torch-bearer in a dusky, self-deceiving world. Helen and Franklin were akin in that; they elicited, they radiated truth, and Althea recalled, too, how their eyes would sometimes meet in silence when they both saw the same truth simultaneously. Not that Helen's truth was often Franklin's; they were as alien as ever in their outlook, of this Althea was convinced; but though the outlook was so different, the faculty of sight was the same in both--clear, unperturbed, and profoundly independent. They were neither of them dusky or self-deceived. And what was she? Sitting in the drawing-room at Merriston and thinking it all over, Althea asked herself the question while her heart sank to a deeper dejection. Not only had she lost Franklin; she had lost herself. She embarked on the dangerous and often demoralising search for a definite, recognisable personality--something to lean on with security, a standard and a prop. With growing dismay she could find only a sorry little group of shivering hopes and shaken adages. What was she? Only a well-educated nonentity with, for all coherence and purpose in life, a knowledge of art and literature and a helpless feeling for charm. Poor Althea was rapidly sinking to the nightmare stage of introspection; she saw, fitfully, not restoringly, that it was nightmare, and dragging herself away from these miserable dissections, fixed her eyes on something not herself, on the thing that, after all, gave her, even to the nightmare