He sought her out next morning on the first opportunity. She was in the library writing letters. She looked, as was usual with her at early morning hours, odd to the verge of ugliness. It always took her some time to recover from the drowsy influences of the night. She was dimmed, as it were, with eyelids half awake, and small lips pouting, and she seemed at once more childlike and more worn than later in the day. Gerald looked at her with satisfaction. To his observant and appreciative eye, Helen was often at her most charming when at her ugliest.
'I've something to talk over,' he said. 'Can you give me half an hour or so?'
She answered, 'Certainly,' laying down her pen, and leaning back in her chair.
'Your letters aren't important? I may keep you for a longish time. Perhaps we might put it off till the afternoon?'
'They aren't in the least important. You may keep me as long as you like.'
'Thanks. Have a cigarette?' He offered his case, and Helen took one and lighted it at the match he held for her, and then Gerald, lighting his own, proceeded to stroll up and down the room reflecting.
'Helen,' he began, 'I've been thinking things over.' His tone was serene, yet a little inquiring. He might have been thinking over some rather uncertain investment, or the planning of a rather exacting trip abroad. Yet Helen's intuition leaped at once to deeper significances. Looking out of the window at the lawn, bleached with dew, the trees, the distant autumnal uplands, while she quietly smoked her cigarette, it was as if her sub-consciousness, aroused and vigilant, held its breath, waiting.
'You know,' said Gerald, 'what I've always really wanted to do more than anything else. As I get older, I want it more and more, and get more and more tired of my shambling sort of existence. I love this old place and I love the country. I'd like nothing so much as to be able to live here, try my hand at farming, paint a little, read a little, and get as much hunting as I could.'
Helen, blowing a ring of smoke and watching it softly hover, made no comment on these prefatory remarks.
'Well, as you know,' said Gerald, 'to do that needs money; and I've none. And you know that the only solution we could ever find was that I should marry money. And you know that I never found a woman with money whom I liked well enough.' He was not looking at Helen as he said this; his eyes were on the shabby old carpet that he was pacing. And in the pause that followed Helen did not speak. She knew—it was all that she had time to know—that her silence was expectant only, not ominous. Consciousness, now, as well as sub-consciousness, seemed rushing to the bolts and bars and windows of the little lodge of friendship, making it secure—if still it might be made secure—against the storm that gathered. She could not even wonder who Gerald had found. She had only time for the dreadful task of defence, so that no blast of reality should rush in upon them.