"What makes you ask, Alex? You're not unhappy about the nonsense that child Pamela sometimes talks, are you?"
"No, not exactly. It's--it's just everything...." Alex looked miserable, tongue-tied.
"Oh, Alex, do try and take things more lightly. You make yourself so unhappy, poor child, with all this self-torment. Can't you take things as they come, more?"
The counsel found unavailing echo in Alex' own mind. She knew that her mental outlook was wrenched out of all gear, and she knew also, in some dim, undefined way, that a worn-out physical frame was responsible for much of her self-inflicted torment of mind. Sometimes she wondered whether the impending solution to her whole destiny, still hanging over her, would find her on the far side of the abyss which separates the normal from the insane.
The days slipped by, and then, just before the general dispersal, Pamela suddenly announced her engagement to Lord Richard Gunvale, the youngest and by far the wealthiest of her many suitors.
"Oh, Pam, Pam!" cried Violet, laughing, "why couldn't you wait till after we'd left town?"
But every one was delighted, and congratulations and letters and presents and telegrams poured in.
Pamela declared that she would not be married until the winter, and refused to break her yachting engagement. She was more popular than ever now, and every one laughed at her delightful originality and gazed at the magnificence of the emerald and diamond ring on her left hand.
And Alex began to hope faintly that perhaps when Pamela was married, things might be different at Clevedon Square.
Then one night, just before she was to go to Hampstead, she overheard a conversation between Cedric and his wife.
She was on the stairs in the dark, and they were in the lighted hall below, and from the first instant that Cedric spoke, Alex lost all sense of what she was doing, and listened.
"...they're wearing you out, Pam and Alex between them. I won't have any more of it, I tell you."
"No, no, my dear old goose. Of course they're not." Violet's soft laughter came up to Alex' ears with a muffled sound, as though her head were resting against Cedric's shoulder. "Anyhow, it isn't Pam--I'm _delighted_ about her, of course. Only Alex--I wish she was happier!"