er who marked the change. To the rest of
the world she was as she had ever been, quiet and gentle, perhaps a
little colourless, possibly in the eyes of some even insignificant,
--"too reserved to be interesting," according to Colonel Bradlaw who
liked a woman to have plenty of vivacity and mirth in her composition.

To those who knew her best--to Nick, to Daisy, and to Noel--she was
changed, though it was a change of which she herself was scarcely aware.
Her re-awakened spontaneity had gone again. She asked sympathy of none.
Even to Nick she made no confidences. She had become wholly woman, and
she had learned as it were to stand alone. She preferred her solitude.

Of Noel she seemed a little shy at first, until by frank good-fellowship
he overcame this. Noel's courtship was apparently at a standstill. He
made no open attempt to further his cause with her, though every day he
sought her out with cheery friendliness, never overstepping the mark,
never giving her the smallest occasion for embarrassment. And thus every
day her confidence in him grew. She came to rely upon him in a fashion
that she scarcely realized, depending upon his consideration and
unfailing chivalry more than she knew. She had never liked him better
than she liked him then, in the first desperate bitterness of her
trouble. He asked so little of her, was so readily pleased with her mere
friendship, and though at the back of her mind she knew that this was
only his pleasant method of marking time she was none the less grateful
to him for his patience. He helped her through her dark hours without
seeming in the least aware that she needed help. He demanded rather than
offered sympathy, and in giving it she found herself oddly soothed. She
was glad that Noel wanted her, glad that he regarded her co-operation as
quite indispensable to his schemes. He occupied her thoughts at a time
when private reflection was torture. The misery was there perpetually at
her heart, but he gave her no time to dwell upon it. He carried her
along with him with an impetus which she had no desire to resist.

Nick watched his tactics from afar with unwilling admiration, wryly
admitting to himself that they were precisely the tactics he would have
pursued. He saw that the fulfilment of his prediction was merely a
matter of time, and prepared himself to yield to the inevitable with as
good a grace as he could muster. He was in fact more in sympathy with
Noel than with Olga just th