the lawn under the mulberry-tree at Grimshaw Rectory,
and when ensconced for her long visit in Colonel and Mrs. Colling's
little house in Devonshire, where hydrangeas grew against a blue
background of sea, and a small white yacht rocked in the bay at the foot
of the garden.

It was therefore with some perplexity that, here too, she brought from
her interviews with Helen an impression of new standards. They were not
drastic and relegating, like those of Lady Blair's; they did not make
her feel unsafe as Lady Blair's had done; they merely made her feel that
her world was very narrow and she herself rather ingenuous.

Helen herself seemed unaware of standards, and had certainly never
experienced any of Althea's anxieties. She had always been safe, partly,
Althea had perceived, because she had been born safe, but, in the main,
because she was quite indifferent to safety. And with this indifference
and this security went the further fact that she had, probably, never
been ingenuous. With all her admiration, her affection for her new
friend, this sense of the change that she was working in her life
sometimes made Althea a little afraid of her, and sometimes a little
indignant. She, herself, was perfectly safe in America, and when she
felt indignant she asked herself what Helen Buchanan would have done had
she been turned into a strange continent with hardly any other guides
than the memory of a lorgnette and a Baedeker.

It was when she was bound to answer this question, and to recognise that
in such circumstances Miss Buchanan would have gone her way, entirely
unperturbed, and entirely sure of her own preferences, that Althea felt
afraid of her. In all circumstances, she more and more clearly saw it,
Miss Buchanan would impose her own standards, and be oppressed or
enlightened by none. Althea had always thought of herself as very calm
and strong; it was as calm and strong that Franklin Winslow Kane so
worshipped her; but when she talked to Miss Buchanan she had sharp
shoots of suspicion that she was, in reality, weak and wavering.

Althea's accounts of her friends in England seemed to interest Miss
Buchanan even less than her accounts of Bayreuth. She had met Miss
Buckston, but had only a vague and, evidently, not a pleasant impression
of her. Lady Blair she had never heard of, nor the inmates of Grimshaw
Rectory. The Collings were also blanks, except that Mrs. Colling had an
uncle, an old Lord Taunton; and when Althea pu