iss Robinson could not be avoided. She tip-toed in and sat
beside her sofa commenting compassionately on her pallor. 'I do so beg
you to go straight to bed, dear,' she said. 'Let me give you some sal
volatile; there is nothing better for a headache.'

But Althea, smiling heroically, said that she must stay up to see
Franklin Kane. 'He wants to see me, and will be here at six. After he is
gone I will go to bed.' She did not know why she should thus arrange
facts a little for Miss Robinson; but all her nature was stretched on
its impulse towards safety, and it was automatically that she adjusted
facts to that end. After the first great moment of enfranchisement and
soaring, it was like relapsing to some sub-conscious function of the
organism--digestion or circulation--that did things for one if one
didn't interfere with it. Her mind no longer directed her course except
in this transformed and subsidiary guise; it had become part of the
machinery of self-preservation.

'You really are an angel, my dear,' said Miss Robinson. 'You oughtn't to
allow your devotees to _accaparer_ you like this. You will wear yourself
out.'

Althea, with a smile still more heroic, said that dear Franklin could
never wear her out; and Miss Robinson, not to be undeceived, shook her
head, while retiring to make room for the indiscreet friend.

When she was gone, Althea got up and took her place in the chintz chair
where she had waited for so long yesterday.

Outside, a foggy day closed to almost opaque obscurity. The fire burned
brightly, there were candles on the mantelpiece and a lamp on the table,
yet the encompassing darkness seemed to have entered the room. After the
aerial heights of the morning it was now at a corresponding depth, as if
sunken to the ocean-bed, that she seemed to sit and wait, and feel, in
a trance-like pause, deep, essential forces working. And she remembered
the sunny day in Paris, and the other hotel drawing-room where, empty
and aimless, she had sat, only six months ago. How much had come to her
since then; through how much hope and life had she lived, to what
heights been lifted, to what depths struck down. And now, once more she
sat, bereft of everything, and waiting for she knew not what.

Franklin appeared almost to the moment. Althea had not seen him since
leaving London some weeks before, and at the first glance he seemed to
her in some way different. She had only time to think, fleetingly, of
all that had ha