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Rh friends who could have understood why she could not make up her mind to marry Altringham; but at the moment Grace was too much absorbed in her own problems to pay much attention to her friend's, and, according to her wont, she immediately "unpacked" her difficulties.

Nat was not getting what she had hoped out of his European opportunity. Oh, she was enough of an artist herself to know that there must be fallow periods—that the impact of new impressions seldom produced immediate results. She had allowed for all that. But her past experience of Nat's moods had taught her to know just when he was assimilating, when impressions were fructifying in him. And now they were not, and he knew it as well as she did. There had been too much rushing about, too much excitement and sterile flattery Mrs. Melrose? Well, yes, for a while the trip to Spain had been a love-journey, no doubt. Grace spoke calmly, but the lines of her face sharpened: she had suffered, oh horribly, at his going to Spain without her. Yet she couldn't, for the children's sake, afford to miss the big sum that Ursula Gillow had given her for her fortnight at Ruan. And her playing had struck people, and led, on the way back, to two or three profitable engagements in private houses in London. Fashionable society had made "a little fuss" about her, and it had surprised and pleased Nat, and given her a new importance in his eyes. "He was beginning to forget that I wasn't only a