season was taking a good deal out of her.  She was bravely and rigidly commonplace with Kendal, who told her that she ought to drop it and go out of town—­she was not looking well.  She drew closer to her father, and at the same time armed her secret against him at all points.  Janet would have had any one know rather than he.  She felt that it implied almost a breach of faith, of comradeship, to say nothing of the complication of her dignity, which she wanted upheld in his eyes before all others.  In reality she made him more the sovereign of her affections and the censor of her relations than nature designed Lawrence Cardiff to be in the parental connection.  It gave him great pleasure that he could make his daughter a friend, and accord her the independence of a friend; it was a satisfaction to him that she was not obtrusively filial.  Her feeling for Kendal, under the circumstances, would have hurt him if he bad known of it, but only through his sympathy and his affection—­he was unacquainted with the jealousy of a father.  But in Janet’s eyes they made their little world together, indispensable to each other as its imaginary hemispheres.  She had a quiet pain, in the infrequent moments when she allowed herself the full realization of her love for Kendal, in the knowledge that she, of her own motion, had disturbed its unities and its ascendancies.

Since that evening at Lady Halifax’s, when Janet saw John Kendal reddening so unaccountably, she had felt singularly more tolerant of Elfrida’s theories.  She combated them as vigorously as ever, but she lost her dislike to discussing them.  As it became more and more obvious that Kendal found in Elfrida a reward for the considerable amount of time he spent in her society, so Janet arrived at the point of encouraging her heresies, especially with their personal application.  She took secret comfort in them; she hoped they would not change, and she was too honest to disguise to herself the reason.  If Elfrida cared for him, Janet assured herself, the case would be entirely different—­she would stamp out her own feeling without mercy, to the tiniest spark.  She would be glad, in time, to have crushed it for Elfrida, though it did seem that it would be more easily done for a stranger, somebody she wouldn’t have to know afterward.  But if Elfrida didn’t care, as a matter of principle Janet was unable to see the least harm in making her say so as often as possible.  They were talking together in Mr. Cardiff’s library late one June afternoon, when it seemed to Janet that the crisis came, that she could never again speak of such matters to Elfrida without betraying herself.  Things were growing dim about the room, the trees stood in dusky groups in the square outside.  There was the white glimmer of the tea-things between them, and just light enough to define the shadows round the other girl’s face, and write upon it the difference it bore, in Janet’s eyes, to every other face.