eciate
at its full value the significance of a simple English gentleman with a
small country seat. 'I suppose you'll live quite quietly, Althea, dear,'
more than one old friend had said, with an approbation not altogether
grateful to her. 'Your aunt tells me that it's such a nice little place,
your future home. I'm so glad you are not making a great worldly
match.' Althea had no wish to make a great worldly match, but she did
not care that her friends should see her upon such an over-emphatically
sober background.

The report of Gerald's charm had been the really luminous fact in her
new situation, and it had been most generously spread by Aunt Julia.
Althea had felt warmed by the compensatory brightness it cast about her.
Althea Jakes was not going to make a great match, but she was, and
everybody knew it, going to marry a 'perfectly charming' man. This,
after all, was to be crowned with beams. It was upon the thought of that
charm that she dwelt when the long meditations became oppressively
confused. She might be giving up certain things--symbolised by the
books, the fruit, the flowers, that testified to her importance in
Boston; she might be going to accept certain difficulties and certain
disappointments, but the firm ground on which she stood was the fact
that Gerald was charming. At moments she felt herself yearn towards that
charm; it was a reviving radiance in which she must steep her rather
numbed and rather weary being. To see his eyes, to see his smile, to
hear his voice that made her think of bells and breezes, would be enough
to banish wistfulness, or, at all events, to put it in its proper place
as merely temporary and negligible.

Althea's heart beat fast as the shores of Ireland stole softly into
sight on a pearly horizon, and it really fluttered, like that of any
love-sick girl, when her packet of letters was brought to her at
Queenstown. In Gerald's she would feel the central rays coming out to
greet her. But when she had read Gerald's letter it was as if a blank
curtain had fallen before her, shutting out all rays. He was not coming
to meet her at Liverpool. The sharpness of her dismay was like a box on
the ear, and it brought tears to her eyes and anger to her heart. Yes,
actually, with no contrition, or consciousness of the need for it, he
said quite gaily and simply that he would see her in London on Saturday;
he had a ball in the country for Friday night. He offered not the least
apology. He was