Page:Across the Stream.djvu/176

166 the moment when Lord Harlow would kiss her. Apart from that, the simplification of life came in again, and against Archie there were certain items which it would be imprudent to disregard. His father was a drunkard, and Archie himself had been consumptive as a child. Consumption ran in families, for Archie's brother had died of it; and so perhaps did drunkenness, though she did Archie the justice of trying and failing to remember that she had ever seen him drink wine at all. These were serious objections in a husband.

There was another, perhaps not less serious. She knew from Cousin Marion that Uncle Jack had lately lost a great deal of money; there was even the question of shutting up or letting the London house next winter. Of course, if she married Archie, they could not spend the winter down at Lacebury, or live with poor Uncle Jack; but London, as wife of an impoverished son, would be very different from London as the wife of a very wealthy man who, so to speak, was nobody's son. Finally, there were certain stories that Cousin Marion had told her about queer messages and communications that had come to Archie, while he was still a child, from his dead brother. That seemed to Helena's practical mind pure nonsense, and yet she had been pleased to hear that, since he was but young in his teens, these rather uncomfortable phenomena had ceased. She felt that she did not believe in them; but, though they had no real existence, she disliked the thought of them. And, though it was so long since there had been any repetition of them, they might (though they were all nonsense) crop up again. She had no belief in ghosts, but she would not willingly have slept in a haunted room. The dead were dead, whereas she was very much alive.

Well, it was time to dress and go down to Cousin Marion. This long, frank meditation (for she was always frank with herself, which perhaps was the