ne, Helena sat in her bedroom, broad awake. She
had got her hair arranged and put on a dressing-gown, and sent her maid
to bed long before, and now she took up a book and tried to read it, and
now and then put it wearily down upon her lap, and then took it up again
and read a page or two more, and then put it away again, and went back
to think over things. What was she thinking about? Mostly, if not
altogether, of the few words the Dictator had spoken to her--the words
that told her he must cut short his visit to Seagate Hall. She knew
quite well what that meant. It meant, of course, that he was going out
to fling himself upon the shore of Gloria, and that he might never come
back. He might have miscalculated the strength of his following in
Gloria--and then it was all but certain that he must die for his
mistake. Or he might have calculated wisely--and then he would be
welcomed back to the Dictatorship of Gloria, and then he would--oh! she
was sure he would--drive back the invaders from the frontier, and she
would be proud, oh! so proud, of that! But then he would remain in
Gloria, and devote himself to Gloria, and come back to England no more.
How women have to suffer for a political cause! Not merely the mothers
and wives and sisters who have to see their loved ones go to the prison
or the scaffold for some political question which they regard, from
their domestic point of view, as a pure nuisance and curse because it
takes the loved one from them. Oh! but there is more than that, worse
than that, when a woman is willing to be devoted to the cause, but finds
her heart torn with agony by the thought that her lover cares more for
the cause than he cares for _her_--that for the sake of the cause he
could live without her, and even could forget her!

This was what Helena was thinking of this night, as she outwatched the
stars, and knew by his tale half-told that the Dictator would soon be
leaving her, in all probability for ever. He was not her lover in any
sense. He had never made love to her. He had never even taken seriously
her innocently bold advances towards him. He had taken them as the sweet
and kindly advances of a girl who out of her generosity of heart was
striving to make the course of life pleasant for a banished man with a
ruined career. Helena saw all this with brave impartial eyes. She had
judged rightly up to a certain point; but she did not see, she could not
see, she could not be expected to see, how a