ds are all right. But Althea must certainly see it first.'

It was settled, however, quite settled in Althea's mind that she was to
take Merriston House. She bade Helen farewell three days later, and they
had arranged that they were, within a fortnight, to meet in London, and
go together to look at it.

And Althea wrote to Franklin Winslow Kane, and informed him of her new
plans, and that he must be her guest at Merriston House for as long as
his own plans allowed him. Her mood in regard to Franklin had greatly
altered since that evening of gloom a fortnight ago. Franklin, then, had
seemed the only fact worth looking at; but now she seemed embarked on a
voyage of discovery, where bright new planets swam above the horizon
with every forward rock of her boat. Franklin was by no means dismissed;
Franklin could never be dismissed; but he was relegated; and though, as
far as her fondness went, he would always be firmly placed, she could
hardly place him clearly in the new and significantly peopled
environment that her new friendship opened to her.

CHAPTER VI.

Helen Buchanan was a person greatly in demand, and, in her migratory
existence, her pauses at her Aunt Grizel's little house near Eaton
Square were, though frequent, seldom long. When she did come, her
bedroom and her sitting-room were always waiting for her, as was Aunt
Grizel with her cheerful 'Well, my dear, glad to see you back again.'
Their mutual respect and trust were deep; their affection, too, though
it was seldom expressed. She knew Aunt Grizel to the ground, and Aunt
Grizel knew her to the ground--almost; and they were always pleased to
be together.

Helen's sitting-room, where she could see any one she liked and at any
time she liked, was behind the dining-room on the ground floor, and from
its window one saw a small neat garden with a plot of grass, bordering
flower-beds, a row of little fruit-trees, black-branched but brightly
foliaged, and high walls that looked as though they were built out of
sooty plum cake. Aunt Grizel's cat, Pharaoh, sleek, black, and stalwart,
often lay on the grass plot in the sunlight; he was lying there now,
languidly turned upon his side, with outstretched feet and drowsily
blinking eyes, when Helen and her cousin, Gerald Digby, talked together
on the day after her return from Paris.

Gerald Digby stood before the fireplace looking with satisfaction at his
companion. He enjoyed looking at Helen, for he admired he