When Alec came back in the early summer, he told me he was to stay for the year. The academy had offered him a place in it, and so had another school and he had chosen the academy.

“Isn’t the other place better?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“A little better; the experience is as good here.”

We did not need to discuss why it was he had stayed. I was a good enough friend of his to be able to ask:—

“Is it fair to Elizabeth?”

“Roberta,” he said, “I’m going to give my whole life to Elizabeth as long as it is of use to her, but I have a right to give a year of it partly to Ellen when she needs me.” For his insight into Ellen had told him that she needed a hand out to her; during the moments of doubt and moments of return to the dead center in which she had lived so long. “Seeing Ellen, and seeing her free, won’t you care more for her than you ought?” I objected.

“I’ll have to get over it if I do. I’ve thought it out, Roberta. Nothing that I give Ellen takes away from what I give Elizabeth. I care for her just as much as I always did, and I’ve always cared for Ellen the same.”

“Oh, Alec!” I cried, “why does the world have to be so at cross-purposes? Why aren’t you free, and why can’t you make Ellen care for you? Are you sure that Elizabeth cares for you?”

“It’s not for me to think things like that at all, Roberta,” he answered. “It would be a poor sort of love I’d bring to Ellen, wouldn’t it? I can’t take kindness from Elizabeth and wrap myself in the cloak of her sympathy when I need it and throw it away when the sun comes out, even had the unimaginable happened, and Ellen cared for me,—which she won’t. Some faiths one has to keep with one’s self.”

As for Ellen, she accepted Alec’s companionship as a matter of course. She had no doubts at all about Alec’s devotion to Elizabeth, for Elizabeth was one who compelled sweetness when one spoke of her. She was a little person, appealing and soft, and the sort of woman who attends to the physical wants of the man she loves so kindly that this devotion is almost spiritual. It never occurred to Ellen that she still held any place in Alec’s heart or that his early affection for her had been anything more than a boyish devotion he had outgrown for a real love. I think through the autumn and long winter, they both lived in the radiance of their affection for one another; they two were in the light together and the past and future were shut out. Perhaps they were better friends that they were not lovers. They both lived like children in the present, neither one looking into the future, when Alec should no longer be hers, but another woman’s.

I think in their mutual satisfaction and the consciousness of their own virtue, they did not realize, as high-minded people often do, how this flowering friendship might affect a smaller nature. Elizabeth grew restless under it, and Miss Sarah found out from gossiping people that Elizabeth had not scrupled to do what was little short of spying on Alec.

“I hope,” she said to Ellen, “that you’re worldly wise enough not to make trouble. Of course, we know that Alec might as well be your brother, but a young woman in love can’t be expected to realize it.”

Alec was supremely unaware of any discontent on Elizabeth’s part; he went over to see her as regularly as he had come home while he was in college, and whatever she felt she kept to herself. I fancy that Alec, whimsical and humorous, large-hearted and kind, would have been hard to approach with a small jealousy. Once in the light of his smile it would have withered up.

It was after more and more of this talk had come to Ellen that I find, for the first time, in her journal a note of emotion about Alec.

It was only when she realized that Alec was going out into a life fraught with difficulties for him, since he loved a woman who had it in her power to hurt him so, that Ellen looked at the future, empty of her friend. From this time her journal is full of Elizabeth. From a woman to be taken for granted, some one sweet whom Alec loved, she became a sinister menace. In her little soft person she carried the unhappiness of what had been sweetest in Ellen’s life.