When I compare you with Cynthia Welwyn!"

She raised her shoulders scornfully. Lucy Friend, aghast at the outrageousness of the comparison, tried to silence her--but quite in vain. Helena ran on.

"Did you watch Cynthia last night? She was playing for Cousin Philip with all her might. Why doesn't he marry her? She would suit his autocratic ideas very well. He is forty-four. She must be thirty-eight if she is a day. They have both got money--which Cynthia can't do without, for she is horribly extravagant. But I wouldn't give much for her chances. Cousin Philip is a tough proposition, as the American says. There is no getting at his real mind. All one knows is that it is a tyrannical mind!"

All softness had died from the girl's face and sparkling eyes. She sat on the floor, her hands round her knees, defiance in every tense feature.

Mrs. Friend was conscious of renewed alarm and astonishment, and at last found the nerve to express them.

"How can you call it tyrannical when he spends all this time and thought upon you!"

"The gilding of the cage," said Helena stubbornly. "That is the way women have always been taken in. Men fling them scraps to keep them quiet. But as to the _real_ feast--liberty to discover the world for themselves, make their own experiments--choose and test their own friends--no, thank you! And what is life worth if it is only to be lived at somebody's else's dictation?"

"But you have only been here twenty-four hours--not so much! And you don't know Lord Buntingford's reasons--"

"Oh, yes, I do know!" said Helena, undisturbed--"more or less. I told you last night. They don't matter to me. It's the principle involved that matters. Am I free, or am I not free? Anyway, I've just sent that telegram."

"To whom?" cried Mrs. Friend.

"To Lord Donald, of course, asking him to meet me at the Ritz next Wednesday. If you will be so good"--the brown head made her a ceremonial bow--"as to go up with me to town--we can go to my dressmaker's together--I have got heaps to do there--then I can leave you somewhere for lunch--and pick you up again afterwards!"

"Of course, Miss Pitstone--Helena!--I can't do anything of the sort, unless your guardian agrees."

"Well, we shall see," said Helena coolly, jumping up. "I mean to tell him after lunch. Don't please worry. And good-bye till lunch. This time I am really going to look after my horse!"

A laugh, and a wave of the hand--she had disappeared. Mrs. Friend was left to reflect on the New Woman. Was it in truth the war that had produced her?--and if so, how and why? All that seemed probable was that in two or three weeks' time, perhaps, she would be again appealing to the same agency that had sent her to Beechmark. She believed she was entitled to a month's notice.

Poor Lord Buntingford! Her sympathies were hotly on his side, so far as she had any understanding of the situation into which she had been plunged with so little warning. Yet when Helena was actually there at her feet, she was hypnotized. The most inscrutable thing of all was, how she could ever have supposed herself capable of undertaking such a charge!

The two ladies were already lunching when Lord Buntingford appeared, bringing with him another neighbouring squire, come to consult him on certain local affairs. Sir Henry Bostock, one of those solid, grey-haired pillars of Church and State in which rural England abounds, was first dazzled by Miss Pitstone's beauty, and then clearly scandalized by some of her conversation, and perhaps--or so Mrs. Friend imagined--by the rather astonishing "make-up" which disfigured lips and cheeks Nature had already done her best with.

He departed immediately after lunch. Lord Buntingford accompanied him to the front door, saw him mount his horse, and was returning to the library, when a white figure crossed his path.

"Cousin Philip, I want to speak to you."

He looked up at once.

"All right, Helena. Will you come into the library?"

He ushered her in, shut the door behind her, and pushed forward an arm-chair.

"You'll find that comfortable, I think?"

"Thank you, I'd rather stand. Cousin Philip, did you send that telegram this morning?"

"Certainly. I told you I should."

"Then you won't be surprised that I too sent mine."

"I don't understand what you mean?"

"When this morning you said there would be seven for dinner to-night, I of course realized that you meant to stick to what you had said about Lord Donald yesterday; and as I particularly want to see Lord Donald, I sent the new groom to the village this morning with a wire to him to say that I should be glad if he would arrange to give me luncheon at the Ritz next Wednesday. I have to go up to try a dress on."

Lord Buntingford paused a moment, looking apparently at the cigarette with which his fingers were playing.

"You proposed, I imagine, that Mrs. Friend should go with you?"

"Oh, yes, to my dressmaker's. Then I would arrange for her to go somewhere to lunch--Debenham's, perhaps."

"And it was your idea then to go alone--to meet Lord Donald?" He looked up.

"He would wait for me in the lounge at the Ritz. It's quite simple!"

Philip Buntingford laughed--good-humouredly.

"Well, it is very kind of you to have told me so frankly, Helena--because now I shall prevent it. It is the last thing in the world that your mother would have wished, that you should be seen at the Ritz alone with Lord Donald. I therefore have her authority with me in asking you either to write or telegraph to him again to-night, giving up the plan. Better still if you would depute me to do it. It is really a very foolish plan--if I may say so."

"Why?"

"Because--well, there are certain things a girl of nineteen can't do without spoiling her chances in life--and one of them is to be seen about alone with a man like Lord Donald."

"And again I ask--why?"

"I really can't discuss his misdoings with you, Helena. Won't you trust me in the matter? I thought I had made it plain that having been devoted to your mother, I was prepared to be equally devoted to you, and wished you to be as happy and free as possible."

"That's an appeal to sentiment," said Helena, resolutely. "Of course I know it all sounds horrid. You've been as nice as possible; and anybody who didn't sympathize with my views would think me a nasty, ungrateful toad. But I'm not going to be coaxed into giving them up, any more than I'm going to be bullied."

Lord Buntingford surveyed her. The habitual slight pucker--as though of anxiety or doubt--in his brow was much in evidence. It might have meant the chronic effort of a short-sighted man to see. But the fine candid eyes were not short-sighted. The pucker meant something deeper.

"Of course I should like to understand what your views are," he said at last, throwing away one cigarette, and lighting another.

Helena's look kindled. She looked handsomer and more maenad-like than ever, as she stood leaning against Buntingford's writing-table, her arms folded, one slim foot crossed over the other.

"The gist of them is," she said eagerly, "that _we_--the women of the present day--are not going to accept our principles--moral--or political--or economic--on anybody's authority. You seem, Cousin Philip, in my case at any rate, to divide the world into two sets of people, moral and immoral, good and bad--desirable and undesirable--that kind of thing! And you expect me to know the one set, and ignore the other set.

Well, we don't see it that way at all. We think that everybody is a pretty mixed lot. I know I am myself. At any rate I'm not going to begin my life by laying down a heap of rules about things I don't understand--or by accepting them from you, or anybody. If Lord Donald's a bad man, I want to know why he is a bad man--and then I'll decide. If he revolts my moral sense, of course I'll cut him. But I won't take anybody else's moral sense for judge. We've got to overhaul that sort of thing from top to bottom."

Buntingford looked thoughtfully at the passionate speaker. Should he--could he argue with her? Could he show her, for instance, a letter, or parts of it, which he had received that very morning from poor Luke Preston, his old Eton and Oxford friend? No!--it would be useless. In her present mood she might treat it so as to rouse his own temper--let alone the unseemliness of the discussion it must raise between them. Or should he give her a fairly full biography of Jim Donald, as he happened to know it? He revolted against the notion, astonished to find how strong certain old-fashioned instincts still were in his composition. And, after all, he had said a good deal the night before, at dinner, when Helena's invitation to a man he despised as a coward and a libertine had been first sprung upon him. There really was only one way out. He took it.

"Well, Helena, I'm very sorry," he said slowly. "Your views are very interesting. I should like some day to discuss them with you. But the immediate business is to stop this Ritz plan. You really won't stop it yourself?"

"Certainly not!" said Helena, her breath fluttering.

"Well, then, I must write to Donald myself. I happen to possess the means of making it impossible for him to meet you at the Ritz next Wednesday, Helena; and I shall use them. You must make some other arrangement."

"What means?" she demanded. She had turned very pale.

"Ah, no!--that you must leave to me. Look here, Helena"--his tone softened--"can't we shake hands on it, and make up? I do hate quarrelling with your mother's daughter."

Involuntarily, through all her rage, Helena was struck by the extreme sensitiveness of the face opposite her--a sensitiveness often disguised by the powerful general effect of the man's head and eyes. In a calmer mood she might have said to herself that only some past suffering could have produced it. At the moment, however, she was incapable of anything but passionate resentment.