away to school and college, he spent as little time at home as possible. Helen was as solitary as a sea-bird, blown far inland and snared. Then came the visits to Merriston House--the cheerful, chattering houseful of happy girls, the kind father and mother, and Gerald. Gerald! From the time that he came into her life all the pictures were full of him, so full that she hardly saw herself any longer; she was only some one who watched and felt. Her violent nature, undisciplined except by its own pride, did not submit easily to the taming processes of a wholesome family life; she dominated the girl cousins, and they only counted as chorus in the drama of her youth. It was Gerald who counted, at once, counted for everything else. She cared so much for him that, feeling her independence slipping from her, she at first quarrelled with him constantly, as far as he would let her quarrel with him. Her brooding bitterness amazed and amused him. While she stormed, he would laugh at her, gaily and ironically, and tell her that she was an absurd little savage. And, after she had burst into a frenzy of tears and fled from him, he would seek her out, find her hidden in some corner of the garden or shrubberies, and, grieved and alarmed, put his arms around her, kiss her and say: 'Look here, I'm awfully sorry. I can't bear to have you take things like this. Please make up.' He could not bear to see her suffering, ludicrous though he thought her suffering to be. And it was this sweetness, this comprehension and tenderness, like sunlight flooding her gloomy and petrified young heart, that filled Helen with astonished bliss. She was tamed at last to the extent of laughing with Gerald at herself; and, though the force of her nature led him, the sweetness of his nature controlled her. They became the dearest of friends. Yes, so it had always been; so it had always looked--to all the rest of the world, and to Gerald. Helen, lying on her divan, saw the pictures of comradeship filling the years. It was her consciousness of what the real meaning of the pictures was that supplied something else, something hidden and desperate that pulsed in them all. How she remembered the first time that she had drawn away when Gerald kissed her, putting up between them the shield of a lightly yet decisively accepted conventionality. They were 'growing up'; this was her justification. How she remembered what it had cost her to keep up the lightness of her smile so that he should not guess what lay beneath. Her nature was all passion, and enclosing this passion, like a steady hand held round a flame, was a fierce purity, a fierce pride. Gerald had never guessed. No one had ever guessed. It seemed to Helen that the pain of it had broken her heart in the very spring of her years; that it was only a maimed and cautious creature that the world had ever known.