"My poor child" (it was the young girl who spoke), "you don't know what you want; but you want something more than that." Durant rattled his color-box in desperation, but the women were too much absorbed to heed his warning, and Frida even raised her voice in answering: "Yes, I'm afraid I do want something more. I know what you're thinking, Georgie. When women of my age go on like this it generally means that they're in love, or that they want to be married, or both." Durant was considering the propriety of bursting out on them noisily from the cover of his umbrella, but before he could decide the point Miss Tancred had continued: "I am not in love." She spoke in the tone of one stating an extremely uninteresting fact. "You _are_ in love, Frida. You're in love with life, and life won't have anything to do with you; it's thrown you over, and a beastly shame, too! You're simply dying for love of it, my sweetheart." Frida did not deny the accusation. They passed on, and in the silence Durant could hear their skirts as they brushed the thorn bush. He could only pray now that he might remain invisible. He felt rather than saw that they turned their heads in passing. "Do you think he heard?" This time it was Miss Chatterton who raised her voice. "It doesn't matter if he did. He's not a fool, whatever else he is." Durant overlooked that flattering tribute to himself in his admiration of Miss Chatterton's masterly analysis and comprehension. She had, so to speak, taken Frida Tancred to pieces and put her together again in a phrase--"Dying for love of life." Beside her luminous intuition his own more logical method seemed clumsy and roundabout, a constructive process riddled by dangerous fallacies and undermined by monstrous assumptions. At the same time he persisted in returning to one of these, the most monstrous, perhaps, of all. In spite, perhaps because, of her flat denial, he pictured Frida not only as mysteriously in love with existence, but with a certain humble spectator of existence. According to the view he had once expounded to her the two passions were inseparable. Before very long he received a new light on the subject. It was his last day, the two cousins were together somewhere, the Colonel was in bed with a bilious attack, and Durant was alone in the drawing-room. He had not been alone long before Miss Chatterton appeared. She came into the room with an air of determination and sat down beside him. She went straight to her point, a very prickly one; there was no beating about the thorn bush with Miss Chatterton. "Mr. Durant," said she, "I want to talk to you--for once. When you first came here what did you think of Miss Tancred?" "I'm afraid I didn't think anything of Miss Tancred." "Did you dislike her?" "N-no. I only found her a little difficult to talk to." "Oh. Well, that's not what I came to consult you about. I want you to help me. I am going to elope----" "You don't mean to say so----"