She smiled a little, not untenderly, as she thought of Althea.

But, just before sinking to deeper drowsiness, and deciding that she must rouse herself and go upstairs to bed, a further consciousness came to her.

The sunny day at Merriston had not, in her thoughts, brought them near to one another--Gerald, and Althea, and her; yet something significant ran through her sudden memory of it.

She had moments of her race's sense of second-sight, and it never came without making her aware of a pause--a strange, forced pause--where she had to look at something, touch something, in the dark, as it were.

It was there as she roused herself from her half-somnolent state; it was there in the consciousness of a turning-point in her life--in Gerald's, in Althea's.