with them that autumn at Merriston, added to the sense of inevitability. Althea had been for this time so absorbed in Franklin, his effect on others and on herself, that she had not felt, as she would otherwise have done, Helen's unsatisfactory attitude. Helen was at last coming, and she was fluttered at the thought of her coming, but she was far more able to cope with Helen; there was more self to do it with; she was stronger, more independent of Helen's opinion and of Helen's affection. But dimly she felt also--hardly aware she felt it--that she was a more effective self as the undecided recipient of Franklin's devotion than as his affianced wife. A rayless person, it seemed, could crown one with beams as long as one maintained one's distance from him; merged with him one shared his insignificance. To accept Franklin might be to shear them both of all the radiance they borrowed from each other. Helen arrived on a very hot evening in mid-August. She had lost the best train, which brought one to Merriston at tea-time--Althea felt that Helen was the sort of person who would always lose the best train--and after a tedious journey, with waits and changes at hot stations, she received her friend's kisses just as the dressing-bell for dinner sounded. Helen, standing among her boxes, while Amelie hurriedly got out her evening things, looked extremely tired, and felt, Althea was sure, extremely ill-tempered. It was characteristic of Helen, she knew it intuitively, to feel ill-temper, and yet to have it so perfectly under control that it made her manner sweeter than usual. Her sense of social duty never failed her, and it did not in the least fail her now as she smiled at Althea, and, while she drank the cup of tea that had been brought to her, gave an account of her misfortunes. She had arrived in London from Scotland the night before, spent two hours of the morning in frantic shopping--the shops like ovens and the London pavements exhaling a torrid heat; had found, on getting back to Aunt Grizel's--Aunt Grizel was away--that the silly maid had muddled all her packing; then, late already, had hurled herself into a cab, and observed, half-way to the station, that the horse was on the point of collapse; had changed cabs and had arrived at the station to see her train just going out. 'So there I paced up and down like a caged, suffocating lioness for over an hour, had a loathsome lunch, and read half a dozen papers before my train started, I came third class with a weary mother and two babies, the sun beat in all the way, and I had three changes. I'm hardly fit to be seen, and not fit to speak. But, yes, I'll have a bath and come down in time for something to eat. I'd rather come down; please don't wait for me.'