Althea had intended to fix the time of her marriage for the end of November; but, not knowing quite why, she felt on her return to England that she would prefer a slightly more distant date. It might be foolish to give oneself more time for uneasy meditation, yet it might be wise to give oneself more time for feeling the charm. The charm certainly worked. While Gerald opened his innocent, yet so intelligent eyes, rallied her on her dejection, called her a dear little goose, and kissed her in saying it, she had known that however much he might hurt her she was helplessly in love with him. In telling him that she would marry him just before Christmas—they were to have their Christmas in the Riviera—she didn't intend that he should be given more opportunities for hurting her, but more opportunities for charming her. Helplessly as she might love, her heart was a tremulously careful one; it could not rush recklessly to a goal nor see the goal clearly when pain intervened. It was not now actual pain or doubt it had to meet, but it was that mist of confusion, wonder, and wistfulness; it needed to be dispersed, and Gerald, she felt sure, would disperse it. Gerald, after a questioning lift of his eyebrows, acquiesced very cheerfully in the postponement. After all, they really didn't know each other very well; they would shake down into each other's ways all the more quickly, after marriage, for the wisdom gained by a longer engagement. He expressed these reasonable resignations to Althea, who smiled a little wanly over them.

She was now involved in the rush of new impressions. They were very crowded. She was to have but a fortnight of London and then, accompanied by Mrs. Peel and Sally, to go to Merriston for another fortnight or so before coming back to London for final preparations. Gerald was to be at Merriston for part of the time, and Miss Harriet Robinson was coming over from Paris to sustain and guide her through the last throes of her trousseau. Already every post brought solemn letters from Miss Robinson filled with detailed questionings as to the ordering of lingerie. So it was really in this fortnight of London that she must gain her clearest impression of what her new environment was to be; there would be no time later on.

There were two groups of impressions that she felt herself, rather breathlessly, observing; one group was made by Helen and Franklin and herself, and one by Gerald's friends and relatives, with Gerald himself as a bright though uncertain centre to it.

Gerald's friends and relations were all very nice to her and all very charming people. She had never, she thought, met so many people at once to whom the term might be applied. Their way of dressing, their way of talking, their way of taking you, themselves, and everything so easily, seemed as nearly perfect, as an example of human achievement, as could well be. Life passed among them would assuredly be a life of gliding along a sunny, unruffled stream. If there were dark things or troubled things to deal with, they were kept well below the shining surface; on the surface one always glided. It was charming, indeed, and yet Althea looked a little dizzily from side to side, as if at familiar but unattainable shores, and wondered if some solid foothold on solid earth were not preferable. She wondered if she would not rather walk than glide, and under the gliding she caught glimpses, now and then, of her own dark wonders. They were all very nice to her; but it was as Gerald's wife that they were nice to her; she herself counted for nothing with them. They were frivolous people for the most part, though some among them were serious, and often the most frivolous were those from whom she would have expected gravity, and the serious those whom, on a first meeting, she had thought perturbingly frivolous. Some of the political friends—one who was in the Cabinet, for instance—seemed to think more about hunting and bridge than about their functions in the State; while an aunt of Gerald's, still young and very pretty, wrote articles on philosophy and was ardently interested in ethical societies, in spite of the fact that she rouged her cheeks, wore clothes so fashionable as to look recondite, and had a reputation perfectly presentable for social uses, but not exempt from private whispers. Althea caught such whispers with particular perturbation. The question of morals was one that she had imagined herself to face with a cosmopolitan tolerance; but she now realised that to live among people whose code, in this respect, seemed one of manners only, was a very different thing from reading about them or seeing them from afar, as it were, in foreign countries. Gerald's friends and relatives were anything rather than Bohemian, and most of them were flawlessly respectable; but they were also anything but unworldly; they were very worldly, and, from the implied point of view of all of them, what didn't come out in the world it didn't concern anybody to recognise—except in whispers. It all resolved itself, in the case of people one disapproved of, into a faculty for being nice to them without really having anything to do with them; and to poor Althea this was a difficult task to undertake; social life, in her experience, was more involved in the life of the affections and matched it more nearly. She found, when the fortnight was over, that she was glad, very glad, to get away to Merriston. The comparative solitude would do her good, she felt, and in it, above all, the charm would perhaps work more restoringly than in London. She had been, through everything, more aware than of any new impression that the old one held firm; but, in that breathless fortnight, she found that the charm, persistently, would not be to her what she had hoped it might be. It did not revive her; it did not lift and glorify her; rather it subjugated her and held her helpless and in thrall. She was not crowned with beams; rather, it seemed to her in moments of dizzy insight, dragged at chariot wheels. And more than once her pride revolted as she was whirled along.

It was at Merriston, installed, apparently, so happily with her friends, that the second group of impressions became clearer for her than it had been in London, when she had herself made part of it—the group that had to do with Helen, Franklin, and herself. In London, among all the wider confusions, this smaller but more intense one had not struck her as it did seeing it from a distance. Perhaps it had been because Franklin, among all that glided, had been the raft she stood upon, that, in his company, she had not felt to the full how changed was their relation. His devotion to her was unchanged; of that she was sure. Franklin had not altered; it was she who had altered, and she had now to look at him from the new angle where her own choice had placed her. Seen from this angle it was clear that Franklin could no longer offer just the same devotion, however truly he might feel it; she had barred that out; and it was also clear that he would continue to offer the devotion that she had left it open to him to offer; but here came the strange confusion—this devotion, this remnant, this all that could still be given, hardly differed in practice from the friendship now so frankly bestowed upon Helen as well as upon herself; and, for a further strangeness, Franklin, whom she had helplessly seen as passing from her life, no longer counting in it, was not gone at all; he was there, indeed, as never before, with the background of his sudden millions to give him significance. Franklin was, indeed, as firmly ensconced in this new life that she had entered as he chose to be, and did he not, as a matter of fact, count in it for more than she did? If it was confusing to look at Franklin from the angle of her own withdrawal, what was it to see him altered, for the world, from drab to rose-colour and to see that people were running after him? This fantastic result of wealth, Althea, after a stare or two, was able to accept with other ironic acceptations; it was not indeed London's vision of Franklin that altered him for her, though it confused her; no, what had altered him more than anything she could have thought possible, was Helen's new seeing of him. Helen, she knew quite well, still saw Franklin, pleasantly and clearly, as drab-colour, still, it was probable, saw him as funny; but it was evident that Helen had come to feel fond of him, if anything so detached could be called fondness. He could hardly count for anything with her—after all, who did?—but she liked him, she liked him very much, and it amused her to watch him adjust himself to his new conditions. She took him about with her in London and showed him things and people, ironically smiling, no doubt, and guarding even while she exposed. And Helen wouldn't do this unless she had come to see something more than drab-colour and oddity, and whatever the more might be it was not the millions. No, sitting in the drawing-room at Merriston, with its memories of the two emotional climaxes of her life, Althea, with a sinking heart, felt sure that she had lost something, and that she only knew it lost from seeing that Helen had found it. It had been through Helen's blindness to the qualities in Franklin which, timidly, tentatively, she had put before her, that his worth had grown dim to herself; this was the cutting fact that Althea tried to edge away from, but that her sincerity forced her again and again to examine. It was through Helen's appreciation that she now saw more in Franklin than she had ever seen before. If he was funny he was also original, full of his own underivative flavour; if he was drab-colour, he was also beautiful. Althea recalled the benignity of Helen's eyes as they dwelt upon him, her smile, startled, almost touched, when some quaint, telling phrase revealed him suddenly as an unconscious torch-bearer in a dusky, self-deceiving world. Helen and Franklin were akin in that; they elicited, they radiated truth, and Althea recalled, too, how their eyes would sometimes meet in silence when they both saw the same truth simultaneously. Not that Helen's truth was often Franklin's; they were as alien as ever in their outlook, of this Althea was convinced; but though the outlook was so different, the faculty of sight was the same in both—clear, unperturbed, and profoundly independent. They were neither of them dusky or self-deceived. And what was she? Sitting in the drawing-room at Merriston and thinking it all over, Althea asked herself the question while her heart sank to a deeper dejection. Not only had she lost Franklin; she had lost herself. She embarked on the dangerous and often demoralising search for a definite, recognisable personality—something to lean on with security, a standard and a prop. With growing dismay she could find only a sorry little group of shivering hopes and shaken adages. What was she? Only a well-educated nonentity with, for all coherence and purpose in life, a knowledge of art and literature and a helpless feeling for charm. Poor Althea was rapidly sinking to the nightmare stage of introspection; she saw, fitfully, not restoringly, that it was nightmare, and dragging herself away from these miserable dissections, fixed her eyes on something not herself, on the thing that, after all, gave her, even to the nightmare vision, purpose and meaning. If it were only that, let her, at all events, cling to it; the helpless feeling for charm must then shape her path. Gerald was coming, and to be subjugated was, after all, better than to disintegrate.

She drove down to meet him in the little brougham that was now established in the stables. It was a wet, chilly day. Althea, wrapped in furs, leaned in a corner and looked with an unseeing gaze at the dripping hedgerows and grey sky. She fastened herself in anticipation on the approaching brightness. Ah, to warm herself at the light of his untroubled, unquestioning, unexacting being, to find herself in him. If he would love her and charm her, that, after all, was enough to give her a self.

He was a little late, and Althea did not feel willing to face a public meeting on the platform. She remained sitting in her corner, listening for the sound of the approaching train. When it had arrived, she heard Gerald's voice before she saw him, and the sound thrilled through her deliciously. He was talking to a neighbour, and he paused for some moments to chat with him. Then his head appeared at the window, little drops of rain on his crisp hair, his eyes smiling, yet, as she saw in a moment, less at her in particular than at the home-coming of which she was a part. 'Yes,' he turned to the porter to say, 'the portmanteau outside, the dressing-case in here.' The door was opened and he stepped in beside her. 'Hello, Althea!' He smiled at her again, while he drew a handful of silver from his pocket and picked out a sixpence for the porter. 'Here; all right.' The brougham rolled briskly out of the station yard. They were in the long up-hill lanes. 'Well, how are you, dear?' he asked.

Althea was trembling, but she was controlling herself; she had all the pain and none of the advantage of the impulsive, emotional woman; consciousness of longing made instinctive appeal impossible. 'Very well, thank you,' she smiled, as quietly as he.

'What a beastly day!' said Gerald, looking out. 'You can't imagine London. It's like breathing in a wet blanket. The clean air is a comfort, at all events.'

'Yes,' smiled Althea.

'Old Morty Finch is coming down in time for dinner,' Gerald went on. 'I met him on my way to the station and asked him. Such a good fellow—you remember him? He won't be too many, will he?'

'Indeed no.'

Gerald leaned back, drew the rug up about his knees, and folded his arms, looking at her, still with his generally contented smile. 'And your guests are happy? You're enjoying yourself? Miss Arlington plays the violin, you said. I'm looking forward to hearing her—and seeing her again, too; she is such a very pretty girl.'

'Isn't she?' said Althea. And now, as they rolled on between the dripping hedges, she knew that the trembling of hope and fear was gone, and that a sudden misery, like that of the earth and sky, had settled upon her. He had not kissed her. He did not even take her hand. Oh, why did he not kiss her? why did he not know that she wanted love and comfort? Only her pride controlled the cry.

Gerald looked out of the window and seemed to find everything very pleasant. 'I went to the play last night,' he said. 'Kane took a party of us—Helen, Miss Buchanan, Lord Compton, and Molly Fanshawe. What a good sort he is, Kane; a real character.'

'You didn't get at him at all in the summer, did you?' said Althea, in her deadened voice.

'No,' said Gerald reflectively, 'not at all; and I don't think that I get much more at him now, you know; but I see more what's in him; he is so extraordinarily kind and he takes his money so nicely. And, O Lord! how he is being run after! He really has millions, you know; the mothers are all at his traces trying to track him down, and he is as cheerful and as unconcerned as you please.' Gerald suddenly smiled round at her again. 'I say, Althea, don't you regret him sometimes? It would have been a glorious match, you know.'

Althea felt herself growing pale. 'Regret him!' she said, and, for her, almost violently, the opportunity was an outlet for her wretchedness; 'I can't conceive how a man's money can make any difference. I couldn't have married Franklin if he'd been a king!'

'Oh, my dear!' said Gerald, startled; 'I didn't mean it seriously, of course.'

'It seems to me,' said Althea, trying to control her labouring breath, 'that over here you take nothing quite so seriously as that—great matches, I mean, and money.'

Gerald was silent for a moment; then, in a very courteous voice he said: 'Have I offended you in any way, Althea?'

Tears stood in her eyes; she turned away her head to hide them. 'Yes, you have,' she said, and the sound of her voice shocked her, it so contradicted the crying out of her disappointed heart.

But though Gerald was blind on occasions that did not seem to him to warrant any close attention, he was clear-sighted on those that did. He understood that something was amiss; and though her exclamation had, indeed, made him angry for a moment, he was now sorry; he felt that she was unhappy, and he couldn't bear people to be unhappy. 'I've done something that displeases you,' he said, taking her hand and leaning forward to look into her eyes, half pleading and half rallying her in the way she knew so well. 'Do forgive me.'

She longed to put her head on his shoulder and sob: 'I wanted you to love me'; but that would have been to abase herself too much; yet the tears fell as she answered, trying to smile: 'It was only that you hurt me; even in jest I cannot bear to have you say that I could have been so sordid.'

He pressed her hand. 'I was only in fun, of course. Please forgive me.'

She knew, with all his gay solicitude, his gentle self-reproach, that she had angered and perplexed him, that she made him feel a little at a loss with her talk of sordidness, that, perhaps, she wearied him. And, seeing this, she was frightened—frightened, and angry that she should be afraid. But fear predominated, and she forced herself to smile at him and to talk with him during the long drive, as though nothing had happened.