The spring waxed into radiant molten summer, mocking with its lush of flower-life, its trill of bird-voice, its downpouring of sunshine, the agony of the nations, and the pitiful grief in one English girl’s inconsolable heart.

Other girls lost their lovers. Never a home in England but held some bereavement now, never a heart in Christendom but nursed some ache. But most of the sorrow and suffering was ennobled and blazoned. Other girls walked proud with their memories—his D.S.O. pinned in their black, the ribbon of his Military Cross worn on their heart, tiny wings of tinsel, of gold, or of diamonds rising and falling with their breath, a regimental badge pinning their lace, a sailor’s button warm at a soft white throat—telling of a “boy” sleeping cold, unafraid in the North Sea, or (proudest of all these) a new wedding-ring under a little black glove—and, perhaps——

Other girls packed weekly boxes for Ruhleben, or walked the London streets and the Sussex lanes with the man on whose arm they had used to lean leaning on theirs, blinded, a leg gone, or trembling still from shell-shock, a face mutilated, broken and scarred in body, nerve-wrecked, but hers, hers to have and to hold, to love and to mother, to lean on her love, to respond to her shy wooing, to beget her children; to show the world, and God, how English women love.

But she—Helen—was alone. No field-card for her—no last kiss at Victoria, no trophy, no hope.

Hugh had been posted as a deserter. It was some hideous mistake, Helen knew that, but the world did not know. Hugh! Hugh dishonored, despised. She knew that he had not deserted. But what had happened? Had he been killed? Had his mind broken? That he had not taken his own life—at least not knowingly—that she knew. But what, what, then, had happened? He had disappeared from her, as from every one else—no trace—not a clue. Where was he? How was he? Did he live? Not a word came—not a whisper—not a hint. And his name was branded. Her name—the name she had dreamed to wear in bridal white and in motherhood. “Mrs. Hugh Pryde”—“Helen Pryde”—how often she had written those, alone in her room—as girls will. “Mrs. Hugh Pryde,” she had liked it the better of the two, and sometimes she had held it to her dimpling, flushed face before she had burned it.

For what the world thought, for what the world said, she held her young head but the higher, and went among men but the more proudly. But under her pride and her scorn her heart ached until she felt old and palsied—and some days she looked it.

She put pictures of Hugh about her rooms conspicuously. Caroline Leavitt and Stephen both wished she had not, but neither commented on it; neither dared. Angela Hilary loved her for it as she had not done before. And for it Horace Latham formed a far higher estimate of her than he had in her happier girl-days.

Spring grew to summer, summer sickened to winter. Still Hugh did not come, or send even a word. The wind whined and sneered in the leafless trees, rattling their naked branches. The snow lay cold on the ground.

A few days after her father’s funeral, Helen left Deep Dale—forever, she thought. But such servants as the war had left them there, she retained there, and there she established her “Aunt Caroline.”

Mrs. Leavitt had been well enough pleased to stay as vicereine at Deep Dale. She would have preferred to come and go with Helen; Curzon Street had its points, but Helen preferred to be alone and said so simply, brooking no dispute. If the girl had been willful before, she was adamant now. Even Stephen found it not easy to suggest or to argue, and never once when he did carried his point.

She locked up the library herself, and forbade that any should enter it in her absence. She pocketed her father’s keys, and scarcely troubled to reply to the suggestion that they might be needed by her cousin.

She had lived alone—except for her servants—in Curzon Street. At that Caroline Leavitt had protested—“so young a girl without even a figure head of a chaperon will be misunderstood”—and as much more along the same lines of social rectitude and prudence as Helen would tolerate.

Helen’s toleration was brief. “My mourning is chaperon enough,” she said curtly, “and if it isn’t, it is all I shall ever have. I wish to be alone. I intend to be.”

“No one to be with you at all—to take care of you,” Stephen had contributed once to Mrs. Leavitt’s urgency.

“No one at all, until Hugh comes home to take care of me.”

Pryde bit his lip angrily, and said no more.

Helen was her own mistress absolutely.

A will disposing of so large a fortune had not often been briefer than Richard Bransby’s, and no will had ever been clearer.

There were a few minor bequests. Caroline Leavitt was provided for handsomely, and so also were Stephen and Hugh. (The will had been signed in 1911.) To Stephen had been left the management of the vast business. Everything else—and it was more than nine-tenths of the immense estate—was Helen’s, absolutely, without condition or control. And even Stephen’s management was subject to her veto, even the legacies to others subject to her approval. She had approved, of course, at once, and the legacies were now irrevocable. But Stephen’s dictatorship she could terminate a year from the day she expressed and recorded her desire to do so, and in the meantime she could greatly curtail it. Bransby had left her heir to an autocracy. And already, in several small ways, her rule had been autocratic. Always willful, her sorrow had hardened her, and Stephen knew that when their wills clashed, hers would be maintained, no matter at what cost to him. Where she was indifferent, he could have his way absolutely. Where she was interested, he could have no part of it, unless it luckily chanced to be identical with hers. He understood, and he chafed. But also he was very careful.

He lived still in Pont Street, in the bachelor rooms he and Hugh had had since their ’Varsity days; for Bransby had liked to have Helen to himself often.

Stephen spent as much time with his cousin as she would let him, and he had from the day of his uncle’s death. And he “looked after” her as much as she would brook.

Vast as the Bransby fortune had been, even in this short time of his stewardship he had increased it by leaps and bounds. A great fortune a year ago, now it was one of the largest, if not the largest, of the war-fortunes. They still built ships and sailed them. He had suggested nothing less to Helen—he had not dared. But they dealt in aircraft too. Stephen had suggested that at a favorable moment, and she had conceded it listlessly.

Air was still his element, and its conquest his desire. His own room at Pont Street was now, as it had been all along, and as every nook of his very own when a boy had been, an ordered-litter of aeroplane models, aerodrome plans, “parts,” schemes, dreams sketched out, estimates, schedules, inventions tried and untried, lame and perfected. They knew him at the Patent Office, and at least one of his own contrivances was known and flown in both hemispheres.

For Helen’s love he still waited, hungry and denied. But his dreams of the air were fast coming true.

Helen had no comrades in these drear days, and scarcely kept up an acquaintance. Angela Hilary had refused to be “shunted,” as she termed it, and she and Horace Latham gained Helen’s odd half-hours oftener than any one else did. The girl had always “enjoyed” Angela, and when sorrow came, gifting her with some of its own wonderful clairvoyance, she had quickly sensed the worth and the tenderness of the persistent woman. And Dr. Latham was secure in her interest and liking, because she associated him closely with her father, and remembered warmly his tact and kindness in the first hours of her bereavement. And, sorry as her own plight was, and dreary as her daily life, she could not be altogether dull to the pretty contrivances and the nice management of the older girl’s love-affair. Grief itself could but find some amusement and take some warmth from Angela’s brilliant, deft handling of that difficult matter. It would have made a colder onlooker than Helen tingle—and sometimes gasp. It certainly made Latham tingle, and not infrequently gasp.