She had come to Merriston House to rest, to drink _eau rougie_ and to rest. She wanted to lapse into apathy and to recover, as far as might be, from her recent unpleasant experiments and experiences. Had she allowed herself any illusions about the experiment, the experience would have been humiliating; but Helen was not humiliated, she had not deceived herself for a moment. She had, open-eyed, been trying for the 'other things,' and she had only just missed them. She had intended to marry a very important person who much admired her. She had been almost sure that she could marry him if she wanted to, and she had found out that she couldn't. It had not been, as in her youth, her own shrinking and her own recoil at the last decisive moment. She had been resolved and unwavering; her discomfiture had been sudden and its cause the quite grotesque one of her admirer having fallen head over heels in love with a child of eighteen--a foolish, affected little child, who giggled and glanced and blushed opportunely, and who, beside these assets, had a skilful and determined mother. Without the mother to waylay, pounce, and fix, Helen did not believe that her sober, solid friend would have yielded to the momentary beguilement, and Helen herself deigned not one hint of contest; she had been resolved, but only to accept; she could never have waylaid or pounced. And now, apathetic, yet irritated, exhausted and sick at heart, she had been telling herself, as she lay in the garden-chairs at Merriston House, that it was more than probable that the time was over, even for the 'other things.' The prospect made her weary. What--with Aunt Grizel's one hundred and fifty a year--was she to do with herself in the future? What was to become of her? She didn't feel that she much cared, and yet it was all that there was left to care about, for Aunt Grizel's sake if not for her own, and she felt only fit to rest from the pressure of the question. To-night, as she turned and wandered among the trees, she said to herself that it hadn't been a propitious time to come for rest to Merriston House. Gerald had been the last person she desired to see just now. She had never been so near to feeling danger as to-night. If Gerald were nice to her--he always was--but nice in a certain way, the way that expressed so clearly his tenderness and his dreadful, his merciful unawareness, she might break down before him and sob. This would be too horrible, and when she thought that it might happen she felt, rising with the longing for tears, an old resentment against Gerald, fierce, absurd, and unconquerable. After making the round of the lawns and looking up hard and unseeingly at the stars, she came back to the terrace. Gerald and Althea were gone, and she surmised that Gerald had not taken much trouble to be nice. She was passing along an unillumined corner when she came suddenly upon a figure seated there--so suddenly that she almost fell against it. She murmured a hasty apology as Mr.