Then with midnight Helena departed.  But long after she was herself in bed, Mrs. Friend heard movements in the adjoining room, and was aware of a scent of tobacco stealing in through her own open window.

Helena, indeed, when she found herself alone was, for a time, too excited to sleep, and cigarettes were her only resource.  She was conscious of an exaltation of will, a passionate self-assertion, beating through all her veins, which made sleep impossible.  Cousin Philip had scarcely addressed a word to her during the evening, and had bade her a chilly good-night.  Of course, if that was to be his attitude it was impossible she could go on living under his roof.  Her mother could not for a moment have expected her to keep her word, under such conditions ...  And yet—­why retreat?  Why not fight it out, temperately, but resolutely?  “I lost my temper again like an idiot, this morning—­I mustn’t—­mustn’t—­lose it.  He had jolly well the best of it.”

“Self-determination”—­that was what she was bent on.  If it was good for nations, it was good also for individuals.  Liberty to make one’s own mistakes, to face one’s own risks—­that was the minimum.  And for one adult human being to accept the dictation of another human being was the only sin worth talking about.  The test might come on some trivial thing, like this matter of Lord Donald.  Well,—­she must be content to “find quarrel in a straw, where honour is at stake.”  Yet, of course, her guardian was bound to resist.  The fight between her will and his was natural and necessary.  It was the clash of two generations, two views of life.  She was not merely the wilful and insubordinate girl she would have been before the war; she saw herself, at any rate, as something much more interesting.  All over the world there was the same breaking of bonds; and the same instinct towards violence.  “The violent taketh by force.”  Was it the instinct that war leaves, and must leave, behind it—­its most sinister, or its most pregnant, legacy?  She was passionately conscious of it, and of a strange thirst to carry it into reckless action.  The unrest in her was the same unrest that was driving men everywhere—­and women, too—­into industrial disturbance and moral revolt.  The old is done with; and the Tree of Life needs to be well shaken before the new fruit will drop.

Wild thoughts like these ran through her mind.  Then she scoffed at herself for such large notions, about so small a thing.  And suddenly something checked her—­the physical recollection, as it were, left tingling in her hand, of the grasp by which Buntingford had upheld her, as she was leaving the boat.  With it went a vision of his face, his dark, furrowed face, in the moonlight.

“The saddest man I know.”  Why and wherefore?  Long after she was in bed, she lay awake, absorbed in a dreamy yet intense gathering together of all that she could recollect of Cousin Philip, from her childhood up, through her school years, and down to her mother’s death.  Till now he had been part of the more or less pleasant furniture of life.  She seemed to be on the way to realize him as a man—­perhaps a force.  It was unsuspected—­and rather interesting.