She stopped mischievously, her head on one side.

"Sorry!--but it slipped out. Lucy--good-night."

Mrs. Friend hurriedly caught hold of her.

"And you won't do anything hasty--about Lord Donald?"

"Oh, I can't promise anything. One must stand by one's friends. One simply must. But I'll take care Cousin Philip doesn't blame you."

"If I'm no use, you know--I can't stay."

"No use to Cousin Philip, you mean, in policing me?" said Helena, with a good-humoured laugh. "Well, we'll talk about it again to-morrow.

Good-night--Lucy!"

The sly gaiety of the voice was most disarming.

"Good-night, Miss Pitstone."

"No, that won't do. It's absurd! I never ask people to call me Helena, unless I like them. I certainly never expected--there, I'll be frank!--that I should want to ask you--the very first night too. But I do want you to. Please, Lucy, call me Helena. _Please_!"

Mrs. Friend did as she was told.

"Sleep well," said Helena from the door. "I hope the housemaid's put enough on your bed, and given you a hot water-bottle? If anything scares you in the night, wake me--that is, if you can!" She disappeared.

Outside Mrs. Friend's door the old house was in darkness, save for a single light in the hall, which burnt all night. The hall was the feature of the house. A gallery ran round it supported by columns from below, and spaced by answering columns which carried the roof. The bedrooms ran round the hall, and opened into the gallery. The columns were of yellow marble brought from Italy, and faded blue curtains hung between them.

Helena went cautiously to the balustrade, drew one of the blue curtains round her, and looked down into the hall. Was everybody gone to bed? No.

There were movements in a distant room. Somebody coughed, and seemed to be walking about. But she couldn't hear any talking. If Cousin Philip were still up, he was alone.

Her anger came back upon her, and then curiosity. What was he thinking about, as he paced his room like a caged squirrel? About the trouble she was likely to give him--and what a fool he had been to take the job? She would like to go and reason with him. The excess of vitality that was in her, sighing for fresh worlds to conquer, urged her to vehement and self-confident action,--action for its own sake, for the mere joy of the heat and movement that go with it. Part of the impulse depended on the new light in which the gentleman walking about downstairs had begun to appear to her. She had known him hitherto as "Mummy's friend," always to be counted upon when any practical difficulty arose, and ready on occasion to put in a sharp word in defence of an invalid's peace, when a girl's unruliness threatened it. Remembering one or two such collisions, Helena felt her cheeks burn, as she hung over the hall, in the darkness.

But those had been such passing matters. Now, as she recalled the expression of his eyes, during their clash at the dinner-table, she realized, with an excitement which was not disagreeable, that something much more prolonged and serious might lie before her. Accomplished modern, as she knew him to be in most things, he was going to be "stuffy"

and "stupid" in some. Lord Donald's proceedings in the matter of Lady Preston evidently seemed to him--she had been made to feel it--frankly abominable. And he was not going to ask the man capable of them within his own doors. Well and good. "But as I don't agree with him--Donald was only larking!--I shall take my own way. A telegram goes anyway to Donald to-morrow morning--and we shall see. So good-night, Cousin Philip!" And blowing a kiss towards the empty hall, she gathered her white skirts round her, and fled laughing towards her own room.

But just as she neared it, a door in front of her, leading to a staircase, opened, and a man in khaki appeared, carrying a candle. It was Captain Lodge, her neighbour at the dinner-table. The young man stared with amazement at the apparition rushing along the gallery towards him,--the girl's floating hair, and flushed loveliness as his candle revealed it. Helena evidently enjoyed his astonishment, and his sudden look of admiration. But before he could speak, she had vanished within her own door, just holding it open long enough to give him a laughing nod before it shut, and darkness closed with it on the gallery.

"A man would need to keep his head with that girl!" thought Captain Lodge, with tantalized amusement. "But, my hat, what a beauty!"

Meanwhile in the library downstairs a good deal of thinking was going on.

Lord Buntingford was taking more serious stock of his new duties than he had done yet. As he walked, smoking, up and down, his thoughts were full of his poor little cousin Rachel Pitstone. She had always been a favourite of his; and she had always known him better than any other person among his kinsfolk. He had found it easy to tell her secrets, when nobody else could have dragged a word from him; and as a matter of fact she had known before she died practically all that there was to know about him. And she had been so kind, and simple and wise. Had she perhaps once had a _tendresse_ for him--before she met Ned Pitstone?--and if things had gone--differently--might he not, perhaps, have married her?

Quite possibly. In any case the bond between them had always been one of peculiar intimacy; and in looking back on it he had nothing to reproach himself with. He had done what he could to ease her suffering life.

Struck down in her prime by a mortal disease, a widow at thirty, with her one beautiful child, her chief misfortune had been the melancholy and sensitive temperament, which filled the rooms in which she lived as full of phantoms as the palace of Odysseus in the vision of Theoclymenus.

She was afraid for her child; afraid for her friend; afraid for the world. The only hope of happiness for a woman, she believed, lay in an honest lover, if such a lover could be found. Herself an intellectual, and a freed spirit, she had no trust in any of the new professional and technical careers into which she saw women crowding. Sex seemed to her now as always the dominating fact of life. Votes did not matter, or degrees, or the astonishing but quite irrelevant fact, as the papers announced it, that women should now be able not only to fit but to plan a battleship. Love, and a child's clinging mouth, and the sweetness of a Darby and Joan old age, for these all but the perverted women had always lived, and would always live.

She saw in her Helena the strong beginnings of sex. But she also realized the promise of intelligence, of remarkable brain development, and it seemed to her of supreme importance that sex should have the first innings in her child's life.

"If she goes to college at once, as soon as I am gone, and her brain and her ambition are appealed to, before she has time to fall in love, she will develop on that side, prematurely--marvellously--and the rest will atrophy. And then when the moment for falling in love is over--and with her it mayn't be a long one--she will be a lecturer, a member of Parliament perhaps--a Socialist agitator--a woman preacher,--who knows?--there are all kinds of possibilities in Helena. But she will have missed her chance of being a woman, and a happy one; and thirty years hence she will realize it, when it is too late, and think bitterly of us both. Believe me, dear Philip, the moment for love won't last long in Helena's life. I have seen it come and go so rapidly, in the case of some of the most charming women. For after all, the world is now so much richer for women; and many women don't know their own minds in time, or get lost among the new landmarks. And of course all women can't marry; and thank God, there are a thousand new chances of happiness for those who don't. But there are some--and Helena, I am certain, will be one--who will be miserable, and probably wicked, unless they fall in love, and are happy. And it is a strait gate they will have to pass through. For their own natures and the new voices in the world will tempt them to this side and that. And before they know where they are--the moment will have gone--the wish--and the power.

"So, dear Philip, lend yourself to my plan; though you may seem to yourself the wrong person, and though it imposes--as I know it will--a rather heavy responsibility on you. But once or twice you have told me that I have helped you--through difficult places. That makes me dare to ask you this thing. There is no one else I can ask. And it won't be bad for you, Philip,--it is good for us all, to have to think intimately--seriously--for some other human being or beings; and owing to circumstances, not your own fault, you have missed just this in life--except for your thoughts and care for me--bless you always, my dear friend.

"Am I preaching? Well, in my case the time for make-believe is over. I am too near the end. The simple and austere soul of things seems to shine out--

"And yet what I ask you is neither simple, nor austere! Take care of Helena for two years. Give her fun, and society,--a good time, and every chance to marry. Then, after two years, if she hasn't married--if she hasn't fallen in love---she must choose her course.

"You may well feel you are too young--indeed I wish, for this business, you were older!--but you will find some nice woman to be hostess and chaperon; the experiment will interest and amuse you, and the time will soon go. You know I _could_ not ask you--unless some things were--as they are. But that being so, I feel as if I were putting into your hands the chance of a good deed, a kind deed,--blessing, possibly, him that gives, and her that takes. And I am just now in the mood to feel that kindness is all that matters, in this mysterious life of ours. Oh, I wish I had been kinder--to so many people!--I wish--I wish! The hands stretched out to me in the dark that I have passed by--the voices that have piped to me, and I have not danced--

"I mustn't cry. It is hard that in one of the few cases when I had the chance to be kind, and did not wholly miss it, I should be making in the end a selfish bargain of it--claiming so much more than I ever gave!

"Forgive me, my best of friends--

"You shall come and see me once about this letter, and then we won't discuss it again--ever. I have talked over the business side of it with my lawyer, and asked him to tell you anything you don't yet know about my affairs and Helena's. We needn't go into them."

"One of the few cases where I had the chance to be kind." Why, Rachel Pitstone's life had been one continuous selfless offering to God and man, from her childhood to her last hour! He knew very well what he had owed her--what others had owed--to her genius for sympathy, for understanding, for a compassion which was also a stimulus. He missed her sorely. At that very moment, he was in great practical need of her help, her guidance.

Whereas it was _he_--worse luck!--who must be the stumbling and unwelcomed guide of Rachel's child! How, in the name of mystery, had the child grown up so different from the mother? Well, impatience wouldn't help him--he must set his mind to it. That scoundrel, Jim Donald!

CHAPTER IV

Mrs. Friend passed a somewhat wakeful night after the scene in which Helena Pitstone had bestowed her first confidences on her new companion.

For Lucy Friend the experience had been unprecedented and agitating. She had lived in a world where men and women do not talk much about themselves, and as a rule instinctively avoid thinking much about themselves, as a habit tending to something they call "morbid." This at least had been the tone in her parents' house. The old woman in Lancaster Gate had not been capable either of talking or thinking about herself, except as a fretful animal with certain simple bodily wants. In Helena, Lucy Friend had for the first time come cross the type of which the world is now full--men and women, but especially women, who have no use any longer for the reticence of the past, who desire to know all they possibly can about themselves, their own thoughts and sensations, their own peculiarities and powers, all of which are endlessly interesting to them; and especially to the intellectual _elite_ among them. Already, before the war, the younger generation, which was to meet the brunt of it, was an introspective, a psychological generation. And the great war has made it doubly introspective, and doubly absorbed in itself. The mere perpetual strain on the individual consciousness, under the rush of strange events, has developed men and women abnormally.

Only now it is not an introspection, or a psychology, which writes journals or autobiography. It is an introspection which _talks_; a psychology which chatters, of all things small and great; asking its Socratic way through all the questions of the moment, the most trivial, and the most tremendous.

Coolness, an absence of the old tremors and misgivings that used especially to haunt the female breast in the days of Miss Austen, is a leading mark of the new type. So that Mrs. Friend need not have been astonished to find Helena meeting her guardian next morning at breakfast as though nothing had happened. He, like a man of the world, took his cue immediately from her, and the conversation--whether it ran on the return of Karsavina to the Russian Ballet, or the success of "Abraham Lincoln"; or the prospects of the Peace, or merely the weddings and buryings of certain common acquaintances which appeared in the morning's _Times_--was so free and merry, that Mrs. Friend began soon to feel her anxieties of the night dropping away, to enjoy the little luxuries of the breakfast table, and the pleasant outlook on the park, of the high, faded, and yet stately room.

"What a charming view!" she said to Lord Buntingford, when they rose from breakfast, and she made her way to the open window, while Helena was still deep in the papers.

"You think so?" he said indifferently, standing beside her. "I'm afraid I prefer London. But now on another matter--Do you mind taking up your duties instanter?"

"Please--please let me!" she said, turning eagerly to him.

"Well--there is a cook-housekeeper somewhere--who, I believe, expects orders. Do you mind giving them? Please do not look so alarmed! It is the simplest matter in the world. You will appear to give orders. In reality Mrs. Mawson will have everything cut and dried, and you will not dare to alter a thing. But she expects you or me to pretend. And I should be greatly relieved if you would do the pretending?"

"Certainly," murmured Mrs. Friend.

Lord Buntingford, looking at the terrace outside, made a sudden gesture--half despair, half impatience.

"Oh, and there's old Fenn,--my head gardener. He's been here forty years, and he sits on me like an old man of the sea. I know what he wants. He's coming up to ask me about something he calls a herbaceous border. You see that border there?"--he pointed--"Well, I barely know a peony from a cabbage. Perhaps you do?" He turned towards her hopefully; and Mrs. Friend felt the charm, as many other women had felt it before her, of the meditative blue eyes, under the black and heavy brow. She shook her head smiling.

He smiled in return.

"But, if you don't--would you mind--again--pretending? Would you see the old fellow, some time this morning--and tell him to do exactly what he damn pleases--I beg your pardon!--it slipped out. If not, he'll come into my study, and talk a jargon of which I don't understand a word, for half an hour. And as he's stone deaf, he doesn't understand a word I say.

Moreover when he's once there I can't get him out. And I've got a bit of rather tough county business this morning. Would you mind? It's a great deal to ask. But if you only let him talk--and look intelligent--"

"Of course I will," said Mrs. Friend, bewildered, adding rather desperately, "But I don't know anything at all about it."