She lay, and drew long quiet breaths in looking at it all. The day of reawakened memories had been like a sword in her heart, and now she seemed to draw it out slowly, and let the blood come with a sense of peace. She could even, as often, lend to the contemplation of her tragedy the bitter little grimace of mockery with which she met so much of life. She could tell herself, as often, that she had never outgrown love-sick girlhood, and that she was merely in love with Gerald's smile. Yet Gerald was all in his smile; and Gerald, it seemed, was made to be loved, all of him, helplessly and hopelessly, by unfortunate her. She felt her love as a misfortune; it was too strong and too unsatisfied to be felt in any sense as joy, though it strung her nature to a painful appreciation of joy. She saw life with a cold, appraising eye; it was like a landscape robbed of all sunlight, and, so robbed, so bleak, and so bereft, it was easy to appraise it, to see, since one could have no warmth or light, what were the next best things to have. She had missed the next best things again and again, when the moment had come for taking them; she had drawn back sick, blanched, shaken with the throes of desperate hope. Only in these last years, when next best things were no longer so plentiful, had hope really died. Her heart still beat, but it seemed to beat thinly, among all the heaped-up ashes of dead hopes. She was free to go forth into the sunless world and choose what place should be hers. She did not care much for anything that world had to give her. But she intended to choose carefully and calmly. She was aware in herself of firm, well-knit faculty, of tastes, sharp and sensitive, demanding only an opportunity to express themselves in significant and finished forms of life; and though Helen did not think of it in these terms, saying merely to herself that she wanted money and power, the background of her intention was a consciousness of capacity for power. Reflecting on this power, and on the paths to its realisation, she was led far, indeed, from any thought of Althea; and Althea was not at all in her mind as, sleepy at last, and very weary, she remembered Gerald's last words. It was the thought of Gerald that brought the thought of Althea, and of Althea's pages. Fair and empty they were, she felt sure, adorned only here and there with careful and becoming maxims. She smiled a little, not untenderly, as she thought of Althea. But, just before sinking to deeper drowsiness, and deciding that she must rouse herself and go upstairs to bed, a further consciousness came to her. The sunny day at Merriston had not, in her thoughts, brought them near to one another--Gerald, and Althea, and her; yet something significant ran through her sudden memory of it. She had moments of her race's sense of second-sight, and it never came without making her aware of a pause--a strange, forced pause--where she had to look at something, touch something, in the dark, as it were.