home by the footpath."

They started off side by side. The first emotion of their meeting having
passed away, he found it easier to talk to her, and he did so in an odd
monosyllabic way which she yet found interesting. All her life she had
been somewhat peculiarly situated with regard to companionship. Her
father, having once taken her abroad and once to London for the season,
considered that he had done his duty to her, and having himself long ago
settled down to the life of a country squire, had expected her to be
content with her position as his daughter and the mistress of his
establishment. There was nothing particularly revolting to her in the
prospect. She was not by any means emancipated. The "new woman" would
have been a horror to her. But, unfortunately, although she was content
to accept a comparatively narrow view of life, she was slightly
epicurean in her tastes. She would have been quite willing to give up
her life to a round of such pleasures as society and wealth can procure,
but the society must be good and entertaining, and its pleasures must be
refined and free from monotony. In some parts of England she might have
found what would have satisfied her, and under the influence of a
pleasure-seeking life, she would in due course have become the woman of
a type. As she grew older the horizon of her life would have become more
limited and her ideas narrower. She would have lived without tasting
either the full sweetness or the full bitterness of life. She would have
filled her place in society admirably, and there would have been nothing
to distinguish her either for better or worse from other women in a
similar position. But it happened that round Thurwell Court the people
were singularly uninteresting. The girls were dull, and the men bucolic.
Before she had spent two years in the country, Helen was intensely
bored. A sort of chronic languor seemed to creep over her, and in a fit
of desperation she had permitted herself to become engaged to Sir
Geoffrey Kynaston, for the simple reason that he was different from the
other men. Then, just as she was beginning to tremble at the idea of
marriage with a man for whom she had never felt a single spark of love,
there had come this tragedy, and, following close upon it, the vague
consciousness of an utter change hovering over her life. What that
change meant she was slow to discover. She was still unconscious of it
as she walked over the cliffs with the grey mist