me their normal relations.
He filled his lungs with the pure air, felt the sun-dazzle pleasant in
his eyes. He had run somewhat mad in the last twenty-four hours surely?
He was not such a fatuous ass as to have mistaken Helen's frank
_camaraderie_, her bright interest in things, her charming little ways
of showing cousinly regard, for some deeper, more personal feeling? She
had been divinely kind, but that was just her--just the outcome of her
delightful nature. She would go away on Friday--Saturday perhaps--he
rather hoped Saturday--and be just as divinely kind to other people.
And then he shook himself, feeling the languid weight of her hands on
his shoulders again. Would she--would--? For an instant he wanted to
get at, and incontinently brain, those other people. After which,
Richard mentally took himself by the throat and proceeded to choke the
folly out of himself. Yes, she would go back to all those other people,
back moreover to the Vicomte de Vallorbes--whom, by the way, it
occurred to him she so seldom mentioned. Well, we don't continually
talk about the people we love best, do we, to comparative strangers?
She would go back to her husband--her husband.--Richard repeated the
words over to himself sternly, trying to drive them home, to burn them
into his consciousness past all possibility of forgetting.

Anyhow, she had been wonderfully sweet and charming to him. She had
shown him--quite unconsciously, of course--what life might be for--for
somebody else. She had revealed to him--what indeed had she not
revealed! He remembered the spirit of expectation that possessed him
riding back through the autumn woods the day he first met her. The
expectation had been more than justified by the sequel. Only--only--and
then Dick became stern with himself again. For, she having,
unconsciously, done so much for him, was it not his first duty never to
distress her?--never to let her know how much deeper it had all gone
with him than with her?--never to insult her beautiful innocence by a
word or look suggesting an affection less frank and cousinly than her
own?

Only, since even our strongest purposes have moments of lapse and
weakness in execution, it would be safer, perhaps, not to be much alone
with her--since she didn't know--how should she? Yes, Richard agreed
with himself not to loaf, to allow no idle hours. He would ride, he
would see to business. There were a whole heap of estate matters
claiming attention. He had n