'But, Miss Buchanan,' he said, pausing between his sentences, for he did not see his way, 'I'm in love with another woman—that is——' and for a longer pause his way became quite invisible—'I've been in love with another woman for years.'

'You mean Miss Jakes,' said Miss Buchanan. 'Helen told me about it. But does that interfere? Helen isn't likely to be in love with you or to expect you to be in love with her. And the woman you've loved for years is going to marry some one else. It's not as if you had any hope.'

There was pain for Franklin in this reasonable speech, but he could not see clearly where it lay; curiously, it did not seem to centre on that hopelessness as regarded Althea. He could see nothing clearly, and there was no time for self-examination. 'No,' he agreed. 'No, that's true. It's not as if I had any hope.'

'I think Helen worthy of any man alive,' said Miss Buchanan, 'and yet, under the strange circumstances, I know that what I'm asking of you is an act of chivalry. I want to see Helen safe, and I think she would be safe with you.'

Franklin flushed still more deeply. 'Yes, I think she would,' he said. He paused then, again, trying to think, and what he found first was a discomfort in the way she had put it. 'It wouldn't be an act of chivalry,' he said. 'Don't think that. I care for Miss Helen too much for that. It's all the other way round, you know. I mean'—he brought out—'I don't believe she'd think of taking me.'

Miss Grizel's eyes were on him, and it may have been their gaze that made him feel the discomfort. She seemed to be seeing something that evaded him. 'I don't look like a husband for a decorative idler, do I, Miss Buchanan?' he tried to smile.

Her eyes, with their probing keenness, smiled back. 'You mayn't look like one, but you are one, with your millions,' she said. 'And I believe Helen might think of taking you. She has had plenty of time to outgrow youthful dreams. She's tired. She wants ease and security. She needs a husband, and she doesn't need a lover at all. She would get power, and you would get a charming wife—a woman, moreover, whom you care for and respect—as she does you; and you would get a home and children. I imagine that you care for children. Decorative idler though she is, Helen would make an excellent mother.'

'Yes, I care very much for children,' Franklin murmured, not confused—pained, rather, by this unveiling of his inner sanctities.

'Of course,' Miss Buchanan went on, 'you wouldn't want Helen to live out of England. Of course you would make generous settlements and give her her proper establishments here. I want Helen to be safe; but I don't want safety for her at the price of extinction.'

Obviously, Franklin could see that very clearly, whatever else was dim, he was the vase for the lovely flower. That was his use and his supreme significance in Miss Buchanan's eyes. And the lovely flower was to be left on its high stand where all the world could see it; what other use was there for it? He quite saw Miss Buchanan's point, and the strange thing was, in spite of all the struggling of confused pain and perplexity in him, that here he, too, was clear; with no sense of inner protest he could make it his point too. He wanted Helen to stay in her vase; he didn't want to take her off the high stand. He had not time now to seek for consistency with his principles, his principles must stretch, that was all; they must stretch far enough to take in Helen and her stand; once they had done that he felt that there might be more to say and that he should be able to say it; he felt sure that he should say nothing that Helen would not like; even if she disagreed, she would always smile at him.

'No,' he said, 'it wouldn't do for her to live anywhere but in England.'

'Well, then, what do you say to it?' asked Miss Buchanan. She had rather the manner of a powerful chancellor negotiating for the marriage of a princess.

'Why,' Franklin replied, smiling very gravely, 'I say yes. But I can't think that Miss Helen will.'

'Try your chances,' said Miss Buchanan. She reached across the table and shook his hand. 'I like you, Mr. Kane,' she said. 'I think you are a good man; and, don't forget, in spite of my worldliness, that if I weren't sure of that, all your millions wouldn't have made me think of you for Helen.'



CHAPTER XXIII.

Helen returned to town on Monday afternoon, and, on going to her room, found two notes there. One from Gerald said that he was staying on for another week at Merriston, the other from Franklin said that he would take his chances of finding her in at 5.30 that afternoon. Helen only glanced at Franklin's note and then dropped it into the fire; at Gerald's she looked long and attentively. She always, familiar as they were, studied any letter of Gerald's that she received; they seemed, the slightest of them, to have something of himself; the small crisp writing was charming to her, and the very way he had of affixing his stamps in not quite the same way that most people affixed theirs, ridiculously endeared even his envelopes. She turned the note over in her fingers as she stood before the fire, seeing all that it meant to him—how little!—and all that it meant to her, and she laid it for a moment against her cheek before tearing it across and putting it, too, into the fire. Aunt Grizel was gone out and had left word that she would not be in till dinner-time. Helen looked idly at the clock and decided that she would take a lazy afternoon, have tea at home, and await Franklin.

When he arrived he found her reading before the fire in the little room where she did not often receive him; it was usually in the drawing-room that they met. Helen wore a black tea-gown, transparent and flowing, the same gown, indeed, remodelled to more domestic uses, in which Althea had first seen her. She looked pale and very thin.

Franklin, too, was aware of feeling pale; he thought that he had felt pale ever since his talk with Miss Buchanan on Saturday. He had not yet come to any decision about the motives that had made him acquiesce in her proposal; he only knew that, whatever they were, they were not those merely reasonable ones that she had put before him. A charming wife, a home and children; these were not enough, and Franklin knew it, to have brought him here to-day on his strange errand; nor was it an act of chivalry; nor was it pity and sympathy for his friend. All these, no doubt, made some small part of it; but they far from covered the case; they would have left him as calm and as rational as, he knew, he looked; but since he did not feel calm and rational he knew that the case was covered by very different motives. What they were he could not clearly see; but he felt that something was happening to him and that it was taking him far out of his normal course. Even his love for Althea had not taken him out of his course; it had never been incalculable; it had been the ground he walked on, the goal he worked towards; what was happening now was like a current, swift and unfathomable, that was bearing him he knew not where.

Helen smiled at him and, turning in her chair to look up at him, gave him her hand. 'You look tired,' she said. 'You'll have some tea?'

'I've been looking up some things at the British Museum,' said Franklin, 'and I had a glass of milk and a bun; the bun was very satisfying, though I can't say that it was very satisfactory; I guess I shan't want anything else for some hours yet.'

'A bun? What made you have a bun?' said Helen, laughing.

'Well, it seemed to go with the place, somehow,' said Franklin.

'I can imagine that it might; I've only been there once; very large and very indigestible I found it, and most depressing. Yes, I see that it might make a bun seem suitable.'

'Ah, but it's a very wonderful place, you know,' Franklin said. 'I should have expected you to go oftener; you care about beauty.'

'Not beauty in a museum. I don't like museums. The mummies were what impressed me most, after the Elgin marbles, and everything there seemed like a mummy—dead and desecrated. Well, what have you been doing besides eating buns at the British Museum? Has London been working you very hard?'

'I've not seen much of London while you've been away,' said Franklin, who had drawn a chair to the other side of the fire. 'I think that you are London to me, and when you are out of it it doesn't seem to mean much—beyond museums and work.'

'Come, what of all your scientific friends?'

'They don't mean London; they mean science,' said Franklin, smiling back at her. She always made him feel happy for himself, and at ease, even when he was feeling unhappy for her; and just now he was feeling strangely, deeply unhappy for her. It wasn't humility, in the usual sense, that showed his coming offer to him as so inadequate; he did not think of himself as unworthy; but he did think of himself as incongruous; and that this fine, sad, subtle creature should be brought, from merely reasonable motives, to taking the incongruous intimately into her life made him more unhappy for her than usual. He wished he wasn't so incongruous; he wished he had something besides friendship and millions; he wished, almost, that his case was hopeless and that friendship and millions would not gain her. Yet, under these wishes, which made his face look tired and jaded, was another feeling; it was too selfless to be called a wish; rather it was a wonder, deep and melancholy, as to what was being done to him, and what would be done, as an end of it all. That something had been done he knew; it was because of Helen—that was one thing at last seen clearly—that he had not, long ago, left London.

'Science is perfectly impersonal, perfectly cosmopolitan, you know,' he went on. 'Now you are intensely personal and intensely local.'

'I don't think of myself as London, then, if I'm local,' said Helen, her eyes on the fire. 'I think of myself as Scotland, in the moorlands, on a bleak, grey day, when the heather is over and there's a touch of winter in the wind. You don't know the real me.'

'I'd like to,' said Franklin, quietly and unemphatically.

They sat for a little while in silence, and Helen, so unconscious of what was approaching her, seemed in no haste to break it. She was capable of sitting thus in silent musing, her cheek on her hand, her eyes on the fire, for half an hour with Mr. Kane beside her.

Franklin was reflecting. It wouldn't do to put it to her as her need; it must be put to her as his; as his reasonable need for the castle, the princess, the charming wife, the home, and children. And it must be that need only, the need of the dry, matter-of-fact friend who could give her a little and to whom she could give much. To hint at other needs—if other needs there were—would not be in keeping with the spirit of the transaction, and would, no doubt, endanger it. He well remembered old Miss Buchanan's hint; it was as a husband that Helen might contemplate him, not as a lover. 'Miss Buchanan,' he said at last, 'you don't consider that love, romantic love, is necessary in marriage, do you? I've gathered more than once from remarks of yours that that point of view is rather childish to you.'

Helen turned her eyes on him with the look of kindly scrutiny to which he was accustomed. She had felt, in these last weeks, that London might be having some unforeseen effect on Franklin Kane; she thought of him as very clear and very fixed, yet of such a guilelessly open nature as well, that new experience might impress too sharply the candid tablets of his mind. She did not like to think of any alteration in Franklin. She wanted him to remain a changeless type, tolerant of alteration, but in itself inalterable. 'To tell you the truth, I used to think so,' she said, 'for myself, I mean. And I hope that you will always think so.'

'Why?' asked Franklin.

'I want you to go on believing always in the things that other people give up—the nice, beautiful things.'

'Well, that's just my point; can't marriage without romantic love be nice and beautiful?'

'Well, can it?' Helen smiled.

Franklin appeared conscientiously to ponder. 'I've a high ideal of marriage,' he said. 'I think it's the happiest state for men and women; celibacy is abnormal, isn't it?'

'Yes, I suppose it is,' Helen acquiesced, smiling on.

'A mercenary or a worldly marriage is a poor thing; it can't bring the right sort of growth,' Franklin went on. 'I'm not thinking of anything sordid or self-seeking, except in the sense that self-development is self-seeking. I'm thinking of conditions when a man and woman, without romantic love, might find the best chances of development. Even without romantic love, marriage may mean fine and noble things, mayn't it? a home, you know, and shared, widened interests, and children,' said poor Franklin, 'and the mutual help of two natures that understand and respect each other.'

'Yes, of course,' said Helen, as he paused, fixing his eyes upon her; 'it may certainly mean all that, the more surely, perhaps, for having begun without romance.'

'You agree?'

She smiled now at his insistence. 'Of course I agree.'

'You think it might mean happiness?'

'Of course; if they are both sensible people and if neither expects romance of the other; that's a very important point.'

Franklin again paused, his eyes on hers. With a little effort he now pursued. 'You know of my romance, Miss Buchanan, and you know that it's over, except as a beautiful and sacred memory. You know that I don't intend to let a memory warp my life. It may seem sudden to you, and I ask your pardon if it's too sudden; but I want to marry; I want a home, and children, and the companionship of some one I care for and respect, very deeply. Therefore, Miss Buchanan,' he spoke on, turning a little paler, but with the same deliberate steadiness, 'I ask you if you will marry me.'

While Franklin spoke, it had crossed Helen's mind that perhaps he had determined to follow her suggestion—buy a castle and find a princess to put in it; it had crossed her mind that he might be going to ask her advice on this momentous step—she was used to giving advice on such momentous steps; but when he brought out his final sentence she was so astonished that she rose from her chair and stood before him. She became very white, and, with the strained look that then came to them, her eyes opened widely. And she gazed down at Franklin Winslow Kane while, in three flashes, searing and swift, like running leaps of lightning, three thoughts traversed her mind: Gerald—All that money—A child. It was in this last thought that she seemed, then, to fall crumblingly, like a burnt-out thing reduced to powder. A child. What would it look like, a child of hers and Franklin Kane's? How spare and poor and insignificant were his face and form. Could she love a child who had a nose like that—a neat, flat, sallow little nose? A spasm, half of laughter, half of sobbing, caught her breath.

'I've startled you,' said Franklin, who still sat in his chair looking up at her. 'Please forgive me.'

A further thought came to her now, one that she could utter, was able to utter. 'I couldn't live in America. Yes, you did startle me. But I am much honoured.'

'Thank you,' said Franklin. 'I needn't say how much I should consider myself honoured if you would accept my proposal.' He rose now, but it was to move a little further away from her, and, taking up an ornament from the mantelpiece, he examined it while he said: 'As for America, I quite see that; that's what I was really thinking of in what I was saying about London. You are London, and it wouldn't do to take you away from it. I shouldn't think of taking you away. What I would ask you to do would be to take me in. Since being over here, this time, and seeing some of the real life of the country—what it's working towards, what it needs and means—and, moreover, taking into consideration the character of my own work, I should feel perfectly justified in making a compromise between my patriotism and my—my affection for you. Some day you might perhaps find that you'd like to pay us a visit, over there; I think you'd find it interesting, and it wouldn't, of course, be my America that you'd see, not the serious and unfashionable America; it would be a very different America from that that you'd find waiting to welcome you. So that what I should suggest—and feel justified in suggesting—would be that I spent three months alternately in England and America; I should in that way get half a year of home life and half a year of my own country, and be able, perhaps, to be something of a link between the English and American scientific worlds. As for our life here'—Franklin remembered old Miss Buchanan's words—'you should have your own establishments and,' he lifted his eyes to hers, now, and smiled a little, 'pursue the just and the beautiful under the most favourable conditions.'

Helen, when he smiled so at her, turned from him and sank again into her chair. She leaned her elbow on the arm and put her hand over her eyes. A languor of great weariness went over her, the languor of the burnt-out thing floating in the air like a drift of ashes.

Here, at last, in her hand, however strange the conditions, was the power she had determined to live for. She could, with Franklin's millions, mould circumstances to her will, and Franklin would be no more of an odd impediment than the husbands of many women who married for money—less of an impediment, indeed, than most, for—though it could only be for his money—she liked him, she was very fond of him, dear, good, and exquisite little man. Impossible little man she, no doubt, would once have thought him—impossible as husband, not as friend; but so many millions made all the difference in possibility. Franklin was now as possible as any prince, though, she wondered with the cold languor, could a prince have a nose like that?

Franklin was possible, and it was in her hand, the power, the high security; yet she felt that it would be in weariness rather than in strength that the hand would close. It must close, must it not? If she refused Franklin what, after all, was left to her, what was left in herself or in her life that could say no to him? Nothing; nothing at all, no hope, no desire, no faith in herself or in life. If it came to that, the clearest embodiment of faith and life she knew sat opposite to her waiting for an answer. He was good; she was fond of him; he had millions; what could it be but yes? Yet, while her mind sank, like a feather floating downwards in still air, to final, inevitable acquiescence, while the little clock ticked with a fine, insect-like note, and the flames made a soft flutter like the noise of shaken silk, a blackness of chaotic suffering rose suddenly in her, and her thoughts were whirled far away. In flashes, dear and terrible, she saw it—her ruined youth. It rose in dim symbolic pictures, the moorland where melancholy birds cried and circled, where the rain fell and the wind called with a passionate cadence among the hills. To marry Franklin Kane—would it not be to abandon the past; would it not be to desecrate it and make it hers no longer? Was not the solitary moorland better, the anguish and despair better than the smug, warm, sane life of purpose and endeavour? If she was too tired, too indifferent, if she acquiesced, if she married Franklin Kane, would she forget that the reallest thing in her life had not been its sanity, and its purpose, but its wild, its secret, its broken-hearted love? Surely the hateful wisdom of the daily fact would not efface the memory so that, with years, she would come to smile over it as one smiles at distant childish griefs? Surely not. Yet the presage of it passed bleakly over her soul. Life was so reasonable. And there it sat in the person of Franklin Winslow Kane; life, wise, kind, commonplace, and inexorably given to the fact, to the present, to the future that the present built, inexorably oblivious of the past. Her tragic, rebel heart cried out against it, but her mind whispered with a hateful calm that life conquered tragedy.

Let it be so, then. She faced it. In the very fact of submission to life her tragedy would live on; the tragedy—and this she would never forget—would be to feel it no longer. She would be life's captive, not its soldier, and she would keep to the end the captive's bitter heart. She knew, as she put down her hand at last and looked at Franklin Kane, that it was to be acquiescence, unless he could not accept her terms. She was ready, ironically, wearily ready for life; but it must be on her own terms. There must be no loophole for misunderstanding between her and her friend—if she were to marry him. Only by the clearest recognition of what she owed him could her pride be kept intact; and she owed him cold, cruel candour. 'Do you understand, I wonder,' she said to him, and in a voice that he had never heard from her before, the voice, he knew, of the real self, 'how different I am from what you think a human being should be? Do you realise that, if I marry you, it will be because you have money—because you have a great deal of money—and only for that? I like you, I respect you; I would be a loyal wife to you, but if you weren't rich—and very rich—I should not think of marrying you.'

Franklin received this information with an unmoved visage, and after a pause in which they contemplated each other deeply, he replied: 'All right.'

'That isn't all,' said Helen. 'You are very good—an idealist. You think me—even in this frankness of mine—far nicer than I am. I have no ideals—none at all. I want to be independent and to have power to do what I please. As for justice and beauty—it's too kind of you to remember so accurately some careless words of mine.'

Franklin remained unperturbed, unless the quality of intent and thoughtful pity in his face were perturbation. 'You don't know how nice you are,' he remarked, 'and that's the nicest thing about you. You are the honestest woman I've met, and you seem to me about the most unhappy. I guessed that. Well, we won't talk about unhappiness, will we? I don't believe that talking about it does much good. If you'll marry me, we'll see if we can't live it down somehow. As for ideals, I'll trust you in doing what you like with your money; it will be yours, you know. I shall make half my property over to you for good; then if I disapprove of what you do with it, you'll at all events be free to go on pleasing yourself and displeasing me. I won't be able to prevent you by force from doing what I think wrong any more than you will me. You'll take your own responsibility, and I'll take mine. And I don't believe we shall quarrel much about it,' said Franklin, smiling at her.

Tears rose to Helen's eyes. Franklin Kane, since she had become his friend, often touched her; something in him now smote upon her heart; it was so gentle, so beautiful, and so sad.

'My dear friend,' she said, 'you will be marrying a hard, a selfish, and a broken-hearted woman who will bring you nothing.'

'All right,' said Franklin again.

'I won't do you any good.'

'You won't do me any harm.'

'You want me to marry you, even if I'm not to do you any good?'

He nodded, looking brightly and intently at her.

She rose now and stood beside him. With all the strange new sense of unity between them there was a stronger sense of formality, and that seemed best expressed by their clasp of hands over what, apparently, was an agreement. 'You understand, you are sure you understand,' said Helen.

'What I want to understand is that you are going to marry me,' said Franklin.

'I will marry you,' Helen said.

And now, rather breathlessly, as if after a race hardly won, Franklin answered: 'Well, I guess you can leave the rest to me.'



CHAPTER XXIV.

Gerald had decided to stay on for another week at Merriston and to come up to town with Althea, and she fancied that the reason for his decision was that he found Sally Arlington such very good company. Sally played the violin exceedingly well and looked like an exceedingly lovely muse while she played, and Gerald, who was very fond of music, also expressed more than once to Althea his admiration of Miss Arlington's appearance. There was nothing in Gerald's demeanour towards Sally to arouse a hint of jealousy; at least there would not have been had Althea been his wife. But she was not yet his wife, and he treated her—this was the fact that the week was driving home—as though she were, and as though with wifely tolerance she perfectly understood his admiring pretty young women who looked like muses and played the violin. She was not yet his wife; this was the fact, she repeated it over her hidden misery, that Gerald did not enough realise. She was not his wife, and she did not like to see him admiring other young women and behaving towards herself as though she were a comprehending and devoted spouse, who found pleasure in providing them for his delectation. She knew that she could trust Gerald, that not for a moment would he permit himself a flirtation, and not for a moment fail to discriminate between admiration of the newcomer and devotion to herself; yet that the admiration had been sufficient to keep him on at Merriston, while the devotion took for granted the right to all sorts of marital neglects, was the fact that rankled. It did more than rankle; it burned with all the other burnings. Althea had, at all events, been dragged from her mood of introspection. She had lost the sense of nonentity. She was conscious of a passionate, protesting self that cried out for justice. Who was Gerald, after all, to take things so for granted? Why should he be so sure of her? He was not her husband. She was his betrothed, not his wife, and more, much more was due to a betrothed than he seemed to imagine. It was not so that another man would have treated her; it was not so that Franklin would have handled his good fortune. Her heart, bereft and starving, cried out for Franklin and for the love that had never failed, even while, under and above everything, was her love for Gerald, and the cold fear lest he should guess what was in her heart, should be angry with her and turn away. It was this fear that gave her self-mastery. She acted the part that Gerald took for granted; she was the tolerant, devoted wife. Yet even so she guessed that Gerald had still his instinct of something amiss. He, too, with all his grace, all his deference and sweetness, was guarded. And once or twice when they were alone together an embarrassed silence had fallen between them.

Mrs. Peel and Sally left on Saturday, and on Saturday afternoon Miss Harriet Robinson was to arrive from Paris, to spend the Sunday, to travel up to town with Althea and Gerald on Monday, and to remain there with Althea until her marriage. Saturday morning, therefore, after the departure of Mrs. Peel and Sally, would be empty, and when she and Gerald met, just before the rather bustled breakfast, Althea suggested to him that a walk together when her guests were gone would be nice, and Gerald had genially acquiesced. A little packet of letters lay beside Gerald's plate and a larger one by Althea's, hers mainly from America as she saw, fat, friendly letters, bearing the Boston postmark; a thin note from Franklin in London also, fixing some festivity for the coming week no doubt; but Sally and Mrs. Peel engaged her attention, and she postponed the reading until after they were gone. She observed, however, in Gerald's demeanour during the meal, a curious irritability and preoccupation. He ate next to nothing, drank his cup of coffee with an air of unconsciousness, and got up and strolled away at the first opportunity, not reappearing until Mrs. Peel and Sally were making their farewells in the hall. He and Althea stood to see them drive off, and then, since she was ready for the walk, they went out together.

It was a damp day, but without rain. A white fog hung closely and thickly over the country, and lay like a clogging, woollen substance among the scattered gold and russets of the now almost leafless trees.

Gerald walked beside Althea in silence, his hands in his pockets. Althea, too, was silent, and in her breast was an oppression like that of the day—a dense, dull, clogging fear. They had walked for quite ten minutes, and had left the avenue and were upon the high road when Gerald said suddenly, 'I've had some news this morning.'

It was a relief to hear that there was some cause for his silence unconnected with her own inadequacy. But anger rose with the relief; it must be some serious cause to excuse him.

'Have you? It's not bad, I hope,' she said, hoping that it was.

'Bad? No; I don't suppose it's bad. It's very odd, though,' said Gerald. He then put his hand in his breast-pocket and drew out a letter. Althea saw that the writing on the envelope was Helen's. 'You may read it,' said Gerald.

The relief was now merged in something else. Althea's heart seemed standing still. It began to thump heavily as she opened the letter and read what Helen wrote:

'DEAR GERALD,—I have some surprising news for you; but I hardly think that you will be more surprised than I was. I am going to marry Mr. Kane. I accepted him some days ago, but have been getting used to the idea since then, and you are the first person, after Aunt Grizel, who knows. It will be announced next week and we shall probably be married very soon after you and Althea. I hope that both our ventures will bring us much happiness. The more I see of Mr. Kane, the more I realise how fortunate I am.—Yours affectionately,

'HELEN.'

Althea gazed at these words. Then she turned her eyes and gazed at Gerald, who was not looking at her but straight before him. Her first clear thought was that if he had received a shock it could not be comparable to that which she now felt. It could not be that the letter had fallen on his heart like a sword, severing it. Althea's heart seemed cleft in twain. Gerald—Franklin—it seemed to pulse, horribly divided and horribly bleeding. Looking still at Gerald's face, pallid, absorbed, far from any thought of her, anger surged up in her, and not now against Gerald only, but against Franklin, who had failed her, against Helen, who, it seemed, did not win love, yet won something that took people to her and bound them to her. Then she remembered her unread letters, and remembered that Franklin could not have let this news come to her from another than himself. She drew out his letter and read it. It, too, was short.

'DEAREST ALTHEA,—I know how glad you'll be to hear that happiness, though of a different sort, has come to me. Any sort of happiness was, for so many years, connected with you, dear Althea, that it's very strange to me to realise that there can be another happiness; though this one is connected with you, too, and that makes me gladder. Helen, your dear friend, has consented to marry me, and the fact of her being your dear friend makes her even dearer to me. So that I must thank you for your part in this wonderful new opening in my life, as well as for all the other lovely things you've always meant to me.—Your friend, 'FRANKLIN.'

Althea's hand dropped. She stared before her. She did not offer the letter to Gerald. 'It's incredible,' she said, while, in the heavy mist, they walked along the road.

Gerald still said nothing. He held his head high, and gazed before him too, as if intent on difficult and evasive thoughts.

'I could not have believed it of Helen,' said Althea after a little pause.

At this he started and looked round at her. 'Believed? What? What is that you say?' His voice was sharp, as though she had struck him on the raw.

Althea steadied her own voice; she wished to strike him on the raw, and accurately; she could only do that by hiding from him her own great dismay. 'I could not have believed that Helen would marry a man merely for his money.' She did not believe that Helen was to marry Franklin merely for his money. If only she could have believed it; but the bleeding heart throbbed: 'Lost—lost—lost.' It was not money that Helen had seen and accepted; it was something that she herself had been too blind and weak to see. In Helen's discovery she helplessly partook. He was of value, then. He, whom she had not found good enough for her, was good enough for Helen. And this man—this affianced husband of hers—ah, his value she well knew; she was not blind to it—that was the sickening knowledge; she knew his value and it was not hers, not her possession, as Franklin's love and all that Franklin was had been. Gerald possessed her; she seemed to have no part in him; how little, his next words showed.

'What right have you to say she's taking him merely for his money?' Gerald demanded in his tense, vibrant voice.

Ah, how he made her suffer with his hateful unconsciousness of her pain—the male unconsciousness that rouses woman's conscious cruelty.

'I know Helen. She has always been quite frank about her mercenary ideas. She always told me she would marry a man for his money.'

'Then why do you say it's incredible that she is going to?'

Why, indeed? but Althea held her lash. 'I did not believe, even of her, that she would marry a man she considered so completely insignificant, so completely negligible—a man she described to me as a funny little man. There are limits, even to Helen's insensitiveness, I should have imagined.'

She had discovered the raw. Gerald was breathing hard.

'That must have been at first—when she didn't know him. They became great friends; everybody saw that Helen had become very fond of him; I never knew her to be so fond of anybody. You are merely angry because a man who used to be in love with you has fallen in love with another woman.'

So he, too, could lash. 'How dare you, Gerald!' she said.

At her voice he paused, and there, in the wet road, they stood and looked at each other.

What Althea then saw in his face plunged her into the nightmare abyss of nothingness. What had she left? He did not love her—he did not even care for her. She had lost the real love, and this brightness that she clung to darkened for her. He looked at her, steadily, gloomily, ashamed of what she had made him say, yet too sunken in his own pain, too indifferent to hers, to unsay it. And in her dispossession she did not dare make manifest the severance that she saw. He did not care for her, but she could not tell him so; she could not tell him to go. With horrid sickness of heart she made a feint that hid her knowledge.

'What you say is not true. Franklin does not love her. I know him through and through. I am the great love of his life; even in his letter to me, here, he tells me that I am.'

'Well, since you've thrown him over, he can console himself, I hope.'

'You do not understand, Gerald. I am disappointed—in both my friends. It is an ugly thing that has happened. You feel it so; and so do I.'

He turned and began to walk on again. And still it lay with her to speak the words that would make truth manifest. She could not utter them; she could not, now, think. All that she knew was the dense, suffocating fear.

Suddenly she stopped, put her hands on her heart, then covered her eyes. 'I am ill; I feel very ill,' she said. It was true. She did feel very ill. She went to the bank at the side of the road and sank down on it. Gerald had supported her; she had dimly been aware of the bitter joy of feeling his arm around her, and the joy of it slid away like a snake, leaving poison behind. He stood above her, alarmed and pitying.

'Althea—shall I go and get some one? I am so awfully sorry—so frightfully sorry,' he repeated.

She shook her head, sitting there, her face in her hands and her elbows on her knees. And in her great weakness an unbelievable thing happened to her. She began to cry piteously, and she sobbed: 'O Gerald—don't be unkind to me! don't be cruel! don't hurt me! O Gerald—love me—please love me!' The barriers of her pride, of her thought, were down, and, like the flowing of blood from an open wound, the truth gushed forth.

For a moment Gerald was absolutely silent. It was a tense, a stricken silence, and she felt in it something of the horror that the showing of a fatal wound might give. Then he knelt beside her; he took her hand; he put his arm around her. 'Althea, what a brute—what a brute I've been. Forgive me.' It was for something else than his harsh words that he was asking her forgiveness. He passed hurriedly from that further, that inevitable hurt. 'I can't tell you how—— I mean I'm so completely sorry. You see, I was so taken aback—so cut up, you know. I could think of nothing else. She is such an old friend—my nearest friend. I never imagined her marrying, somehow; it was like hearing that she was going away for ever. And what you said made me angry.' Even he, with all his compunction, could but come back to the truth.

And, helpless, she could but lean on his pity, his sheer human pity.

'I know. He was my nearest friend too. For all my life I've been first with him. I was cut up too. I am sorry—I spoke so.'

'Poor girl—poor dear. Here, take my arm. Here. Now, you do feel better.'

She was on her feet, her hand drawn through his arm, her face turned from him and still bathed in tears.

They walked back slowly along the road. They were silent. From time to time she knew that he looked at her with solicitude; but she could not return his look. The memory of her own words was with her, a strange, new, menacing fact in life. She had said them, and they had altered everything. Henceforth she depended on his pity, on his loyalty, on his sense of duty to a task undertaken. Their bond was recognised as an unequal one. Once or twice, in the dull chaos of her mind, a flicker of pride rose up. Could she not emulate Helen? Helen was to marry a man who did not love her. Helen was to marry rationally, with open eyes, a man who was her friend. But Helen did not love the man who did not love her. She was not his thrall. She gained, she did not lose, her freedom.



CHAPTER XXV.

A week was gone since Helen had given her consent to Franklin, and again she was in her little sitting-room and again waiting, though not for Franklin. Franklin had been with her all the morning; and he had been constantly with her through the week, and she had found the closer companionship, until to-day, strangely easy. Franklin's very lacks endeared him to her. It was wonderful to see any one so devoid of any glamour, of any adventitious aid from nature, who yet so beamed. This beaming quality was, for Helen, his chief characteristic. There was certainly no brilliancy in Franklin's light; it was hardly a ray and it emitted never a sparkle; but it was a mild, diffused effulgence, and she always felt more peaceful and restored for coming within its radius.

It had wrapped her around all the week, and it had remained so unchanged that their relation, too, had seemed unchanged and her friend only a little nearer, a little more solicitous. They had gone about together; they had taken walks in the parks; they had made plans while strolling beside the banks of the Serpentine or leaning on the bridge in St. James's Park, to watch the ducks being fed. Already she and Franklin and the deeply triumphant Aunt Grizel had gone on a journey down to the country to look at a beautiful old house in order to see if it would do as one of Helen's 'establishments.' Already Franklin had brought her a milky string of perfect pearls, saying mildly, as he had said of the box of sweets, 'I don't approve of them, but I hope you do.' And on her finger was Franklin's ring, a noble emerald that they had selected together.

Helen had been pleased to feel in herself a capacity for satisfaction in these possessions, actual and potential. She liked to look at the great blot of green on her hand and to see the string of pearls sliding to her waist. She liked to ponder on the Jacobean house with its splendid rise of park and fall of sward. She didn't at all dislike it, either, when Franklin, as calmly possessed as ever with a clear sense of his duties, discussed with her the larger and more impersonal uses of their fortune. She found that she had ideas for him there; that the thinking and active self, so long inert, could be roused to very good purpose; that it was interesting, and very interesting, to plan, with millions at one's disposal, for the furtherance of the just and the beautiful. And she found, too, in spite of her warnings to Franklin, that though she might be a hard, a selfish, and a broken-hearted woman, she was a woman with a very definite idea of her own responsibilities. It did not suit her at all to be the mere passive receiver; it did not suit her to be greedy. She turned her mind at once, carefully and consistently, to Franklin's interests. She found atoms and kinetics rather confusing at first, but Franklin's delighted and deliberate elucidations made a light for her that promised by degrees to illuminate these dark subjects. Yes; already life had taken hold of her and, ironically, yet not unwillingly, she followed it along the appointed path. Yesterday, however, and to-day, especially, a complication, subtle yet emphatic, had stolen upon her consciousness.

All the week long, in spite of something mastered and controlled in his bearing, she had seen that he was happy, and though not imaginative as to Franklin's past, she had guessed that he had never in all his life been so happy, and that never had life so taken hold of him. He enjoyed the pearls, he enjoyed the emerald, he enjoyed the Jacobean house and going over it with her and Aunt Grizel; above all he enjoyed herself as a thinking and acting being, the turning of her attention to atoms, her grave, steady penetration of his life. And in this happiness the something controlled and mastered had melted more and more; she had intended that it should melt. She had guessed at the pain, the anxiety for her that had underlain the dear little man's imperturbability, and she had determined that as far as in her lay Franklin should think her happy, should think that, at all events, she was serene and without qualms or misgivings. And she had accomplished this. It was as if she saw him breathing more deeply, more easily; as if, with a long sigh of relief, he smiled at her and said, with a new accent of confidence: 'All right.' And then, after the sigh of relief, she saw that he became too happy. It was only yesterday that she began to see it; it was to-day that she had clearly seen that Franklin had fallen in love with her.

It wasn't that, in any blindness to what she meant, he came nearer and made mistakes. He did not come a step nearer, and, in his happiness, his unconscious happiness, he was further from the possibility of mistakes than before. He did not draw near. He stood and gazed. Men had loved Helen before, yet, she felt it, no man had loved her as Franklin did. She could not have analysed the difference between his love and that of other men, yet she felt it dimly. Franklin stood and gazed; but it was not at charm or beauty that he gazed; whether he was really deeply aware of them she could not tell; the only words she could find with which to express her predicament and its cause sounded silly to her, but she could find no others. Franklin was gazing at her soul. She couldn't imagine what he found to fix him in it; he had certainly said that she was the honestest woman he had known; she gloomily made out that she was, she supposed, 'straight'; she liked clear, firm things, and she liked to keep a bargain. It didn't seem to her a very arresting array of virtues; but then—no, she couldn't settle Franklin's case so glibly as that; if it wasn't what she might have of charm that he had fallen in love with, it wasn't what she might have of virtue either. Perhaps one's soul hadn't much to do with either charm or virtue. And, after all, whatever it was, he was gazing at it, rapt, smiling, grave, in the lover's trance. He saw her, and only her. And she saw him, and a great many other things besides.

The immediate hope that came to her was that Franklin, perhaps, might really never know just what had happened to him. If he never recognised it, it might never become explicit; it might be managed; it could of course be managed in any case; but how she should hate having him made conscious of pain. If he never said to himself, and far less to her, that he had fallen in love with her, he might not really suffer in the strange, ill-adjusted union before them. She did not think that he had yet said it to himself; but she feared that he was hovering on the verge of self-recognition. His very guilelessness in the realm of the emotions exposed him to her, and with her perplexity went a yearning of pity as she witnessed the soft, the hesitant, the delicate unfolding.

For more had come than the tranced gaze. That morning, writing notes, with Franklin beside her, her hand had inadvertently touched his once or twice in taking the papers from him, and Helen then had seen that Franklin blushed. Twice, also, looking up, she had found his eyes fixed on her with the lover's dwelling tenderness, and both times he had quickly averted his glance in a manner very new in him.

Helen had pondered deeply in the moments before his departure. Franklin had never kissed her; the time would come when he must kiss her. The time would come when a kiss of farewell or greeting must, however rare, be a facile, marital custom. How would Franklin—trembling on that verge of a self-recognition that might make a chaos of his life—how and when would he initiate that custom? How could it be initiated by him at all unless with an emotion that would not only reveal him to himself, but make it known to him that he was revealed to her. The revelation, if it came, must come gradually; they must both have time to get used to it, she to having a husband she did not love in love with her; he to loving a wife who would never love him back. She shrank from the thought of emotional revelations. It was her part to initiate and to make a kiss an easy thing. Yet she found, sitting there, writing the last notes, with Franklin beside her, that it was not an easy thing to contemplate. The thought of her own cowardice spurred her on. When Franklin rose at last, gave her his hand, said that he'd come back that evening, Helen rose too, resolved. 'Good-bye,' she said. 'Don't forget the tickets for that concert.'

'No, indeed,' said Franklin.

'And I think, don't you? that we might put the announcement in the papers to-morrow. Aunt Grizel wants, I am sure, to see me safely Morning Posted.'

'So do I,' smiled Franklin.

Helen was summoning her courage. 'Good-bye,' she repeated, and now she smiled with a new sweetness. 'I think we ought to kiss each other good-bye, don't you? We are such an old engaged couple.'

Resolved, and firm in her resolve, though knowing commotion of soul, she leaned to him and kissed his forehead and turned her cheek to him. Franklin had kept her hand, and in the pause, where she did not see his face, she felt his tighten on it; but he did not kiss her. Smiling a little nervously, she raised her head and looked at him. He was gazing at her with a shaken, stricken look.

'You must kiss me good-bye,' said Helen, speaking as she would have spoken to a departing child. 'Why, we have no right to be put in the Morning Post unless we've given each other a kiss.'

And, really like the child, Franklin said: 'Must I?'

He kissed her then, gently, and spoke no further word. But she knew, when he had gone, and when thinking over the meaning of his face as it only came to her when the daze of her own daring faded and left her able to think, that she had hardly helped Franklin over a difficulty; she had made him aware of it rather; she had shown him what his task must be. And it could not reassure her, for Franklin, that his face, after that stricken moment, and with a wonderful swiftness of delicacy, had promised her that it should be accomplished. It promised her that there should be no emotions, or, if there were, that they should be mastered ones; it promised her that she should see nothing in him to make her feel that she was refusing anything, nothing to make her feel that she was giving pain by a refusal. It seemed to say that he knew, now, at last, what the burden was that he laid upon her and that it should be as light as he could make it. It did not show her that he saw his own burden; but Helen saw it for him. She, too, made herself promises as she stood after his departure, taking a long breath over her discovery; she was not afraid in looking forward. All that she was afraid of—and it was of this that she was thinking as she now stood leaning her arm upon the mantelshelf and looking into the fire,—all that she was afraid of was of looking back. It was for Gerald that she was waiting and it was Gerald's note that hung from her hand against her knee, and since that note had come, not long after Franklin had left her, her thoughts had been centred on the coming interview. Gerald had not written to her from the country; she had expected to have an answer to her announcement that morning, but none had come. This note had been brought by hand, and it said that if he could not find her at four would she kindly name some other hour when he might do so. She had answered that he would find her, and it was now five minutes to the hour.

Gerald's note had not said much more, and yet, in the little it did say, it had contrived to be tense and cool. It seemed to intimate that he reserved a great deal to say to her, and that, perhaps more, he reserved a great deal to think and not to say. It was a note that had startled her and that then had filled her with a bitterness of heart greater than any she had ever known. For that she would not accept, not that tone from Gerald. That it should be Gerald—Gerald of all the people in the world—to adopt that tone to her! The exceeding irony of it brought a laugh to her lips. She was on edge. Her strength had only just taken her through the morning and its revelations, there was none left now for patience and evasion. Gerald must be careful, was the thought that followed the laugh.



CHAPTER XXVI.

She heard the door-bell ring, and then his quick step. It did not seem to her this afternoon that she had to master the disquiet of heart that his coming always brought. It was something steeled and hostile that waited for him.

When he had entered and stood before her she saw that he intended to be careful, to be very careful, and the recognition of that attitude in him gave further bitterness to her cold, her fierce revolt. What right had he to that bright formal smile, that chill pressure of her fingers, that air of crisp cheerfulness, as of one injured but willing, magnanimously, to conceal his hurt? What right—good heavens!—had Gerald to feel injured? She almost laughed again as she looked at him and at this unveiling of his sublime self-centredness. He expected to find his world just as he would have it, his cushion at his head and his footstool at his feet, the wife in her place fulfilling her comely duties, the spinster friend in hers, administering balms and counsels; the wife at Merriston House, and the spinster friend in the little sitting-room where, for so many years, he had come to her with all his moods and misfortunes. She felt that her eyes fixed themselves on him with a cold menace as he stood there on the other side of the fire and, putting his foot on the fender, looked first at her and then down at the flames. His very silence was full of the sense of injury; but she knew that hers was the compelling silence and that she could force him to be the first to speak. And so it was that presently he said:

'Well, Helen, this is great news.'

'Yes, isn't it?' she answered. 'It has been a year of news, hasn't it?'

He stared, courteously blank, and something in her was pleased to observe that he looked silly with his affectation of blandness.

'I beg your pardon?'

'You had your great event, and I, now, have mine.'

'Ah yes, I see.'

'It's all rather queer when one comes to think of it,' said Helen. 'Althea, my new friend—whom I told you of here, only a few months ago—and her friend. How important they have become to us, and how little, last summer, we could have dreamed of it.' She, too, was speaking artificially, and was aware of it; but she was well aware that Gerald didn't find that she looked silly. She had every advantage over the friend who came with his pretended calm and his badly hidden rancour. And since he stood silent, looking at the fire, she added, mildly and cheerfully: 'I am so glad for your happiness, Gerald, and I hope that you are glad for mine.'

He looked up at her now, and she could not read the look; it hid something—or else it sought for something hidden; and in its oddity—which reminded her of a blind animal dazedly seeking its path—it so nearly touched her that, with a revulsion from any hint of weakening pity for him, it made her bitterness against him greater than before.

'I'm afraid I can't say I'm glad, Helen,' he replied. 'I'm too amazed, still, to feel anything except'—he seemed to grope for a word and then to give it up—'amazement.'

'I was surprised myself,' said Helen. 'I had not much hope left of anything so fortunate happening to me.'

'You feel it, then, so fortunate?'

'Don't you think that it is—to marry millions,' Helen asked, smiling, 'and to have found such a good man to care for me?'

'I think it is he who is fortunate,' said Gerald, after a moment.

'Thank you; perhaps we both are fortunate.'

Once more there was a long silence and then, suddenly, Gerald flung away, thrusting his hands in his pockets and stopping before the window, his back turned to her. 'I can't stand this,' he declared.

'What can't you stand?'

'You don't love this man. He doesn't love you.'

'What is that to you?' asked Helen.

'I can't think it of you; I can't bear to think it.'

'What is it to you?' she repeated, in a deadened voice.

'Why do you say that?' he took her up with controlled fury. 'How couldn't it but be a great deal to me? Haven't you been a great deal—for all our lives nearly? Do you mean that you're going to kick me out completely—because you are going to marry? What does it mean to me? I wish it could mean something to you of what it does to me. To give yourself—you—you—to a man who doesn't love you—whom you don't love—for money. Oh, I know we've always talked of that sort of thing as if it were possible—and perhaps it is—for a man. But when it comes to a woman—a woman one has cared for—looked up to—as I have to you—it's a different matter. One expects a different standard.'

'What standard do you expect from me?' asked Helen. There were tears, but tears of rage, in her voice.

'You know,' said Gerald, who also was struggling with an emotion that, rising, overcame his control, 'you know what I think of you—what I expect of you. A great match—a great man—something fitting for you—one could accept that; but this little American nonentity, this little American—barely a gentleman—whom you'd never have looked at if he hadn't money—a man who will make you ridiculous, a man who can't have a thought or feeling in common with you—it's not fit—it's not worthy; it smirches you; it's debasing.'

He had not turned to look at her while he spoke, perhaps did not dare to look. He knew that his anger, his more than anger, had no warrant, and that the words in which it cloaked itself—though he believed in all he said—were unjustifiable. But it was more than anger, and it must speak, must plead, must protest. He had no right to say these things, perhaps, but Helen should understand the more beneath, should understand that he was lost, bewildered, miserable; if Helen did not understand, what was to become of him? And now she stood there behind him, not speaking, not answering him, so that he was almost frightened and murmured on, half inaudibly: 'It's a wrong you do—to me—to our friendship, as well as to yourself.'

Helen now spoke, and the tone of her voice arrested his attention even before the meaning of her words reached him. It was a tone that he had never heard from her, and it was not so much that it made him feel that he had lost her as that it made him feel—strangely and penetratingly—that he had never known her.

'You say all this to me, Gerald, you who in all these years have never taken the trouble to wonder or think about me at all—except how I might amuse you or advise you, or help you.' These were Helen's words. 'Why should I go on considering you, who have never considered me?'

It was so sudden, so amazing, and so cruel that, turning to her, he literally stared, open-eyed and open-mouthed. 'I don't know what you mean, Helen,' he said.

'Of course you don't,' she continued in her measured voice, 'of course you don't know what I mean; you never have. I don't blame you; you are not imaginative, and all my life I've taken care that you should know very little of what I meant. The only bit of me that you've known has been the bit that has always been at your service. There is a good deal more of me than that.'

'But—what have you meant?' he stammered, almost in tears.

Her face, white and cold, was bent on him, and in her little pause she seemed to deliberate—not on what he should be told, that was fixed—but on how to tell it; and for this she found finally short and simple words.

'Can't you guess, even now, when at last I've become desperate and indifferent?' she said. 'Can't you see, even now, that I've always loved you?'

They confronted each other in a long moment of revelation and avowal. It grew like a great distance between them, the distance of all the years through which she had suffered and he been blind. Gerald saw it like a chasm, dark with time, with secrecy, with his intolerable stupidity. He gazed at her across it, and in her face, her strange, strong, fragile, weary face, he saw it all, at last. Yes, she had loved him all her life, and he had never seen it.

She had moved, in speaking to him, away from her place near the fire, and he now went to it, and put his arms on the mantelpiece and hid his face upon them. 'Fool—fool that I am!' he uttered softly. He stood so, his face hidden from her, and his words seemed to release some bond in Helen's heart. The worst of the bitterness against him passed away. The tragedy, after all, was not his fault, but Fate's, and to suggest that he was accountable was to be grotesquely stupid. That he had not loved her was the tragedy; that he had never seen was, in reality, the tragedy's alleviation. Absurd to blame poor Gerald for not seeing. When she spoke again it was in an altered voice.

'No, you're not,' she said, and she seemed with him to contemplate the chasm and to make it clear for him—she had always made things clear for him, and there was now, with all the melancholy, a peacefulness in sharing with him this, their last, situation. Never before had they talked over one so strange, and never again would they talk over any other so near; to speak at last was to make it, in its very nearness, immeasurably remote, to put it away, from both their lives, for ever. 'No, you're not; I shouldn't have said that you were not imaginative; I shouldn't have said that you had never considered me; you have—you have been the best of friends; I was letting myself be cruel. It's only that I'm not a fool. A woman who isn't can always keep a man from imagining; it's the one thing that even a stupid woman can do. And my whole nature has been moulded by the instinct for concealment.' She looked round mechanically for a seat while she spoke; she felt horribly tired; and she sank on a straight, high chair near the writing-table. Here, leaning forward, her arms resting on her knees, her hands clasped and hanging, she went on, looking before her. 'I want to tell you about it now. There are things to confess. I haven't been a nice woman in it all; I've not taken it as a nice woman would. I've hated you for not loving me. I've hated you for not wanting anything more from me and for your contentment with what I gave you, and for caring as much as you did, too, for being fonder of me than of any one else in the world, and yet never caring more. Of course I understood; it was a little comfort to my pride to understand. Even if I'd been the sort of woman you would have fallen in love with, I was too near. I had to make myself too near; that was my shield. I had to give you everything you wanted because that was the sure way to hide from you that I had so much more to give. And for years I went on hoping—not that you would see—I should have lost everything then—but that, of yourself, you would want more.'

Gerald had lifted his head, but his hand still hid his eyes. 'Helen, dear Helen,' he said, and she did not understand his voice—it was pain, but more than pain; 'why were you so cruel? why were you so proud? If you'd only let me see; if you'd only given me a hint. Don't you know it only needed that?'

She paused over his question for so long that he put down his hand and looked at her, and her eyes, meeting his unfalteringly, widened with a strained, suffering look.

'It's kind of you to say so,' she said. 'And I know you believe it now; you are so fond of me, and so sorry for this horrid tale I inflict on you, that you have to believe it. And of course it may be true. Perhaps it did only need that.'

They had both now looked away again, Gerald gazing unseeingly into the mirror, Helen at the opposite wall. 'It may be true,' she repeated. 'I had only, perhaps, to be instinctive—to withdraw—to hide—create the little mysteries that appeal to men's senses and imaginations. I had only to put aside my pride and to shut my eyes on my horrible, hard, lucid self-consciousness, let instinct guide me, be a mere woman, and you might have been in love with me. It's true. I used often to think it, too. I used often to think that I might make you fall in love with me if I could stop being your friend. But, don't you see, I knew myself far too well. I was too proud. I didn't want you if you only wanted me because I'd lured you and appealed to your senses and imagination. I didn't want you unless you wanted me for the big and not for the little things of love. I couldn't pretend that I had something to hide—I know perfectly how it is done—the air of evasion, of wistfulness—all the innocent hypocrisies women make use of; but I couldn't. I didn't want you like that. There was nothing for it but to look straight at you and pretend, not that there was anything to hide, but that there was nothing.'

Again, his eyes meeting hers, she looked, indeed, straight at him and smiled a little; for there was, indeed, nothing now to hide; and she went on quietly, 'You see now, how I've been feeling for these last months, when everything has gone, at last, completely. I'd determined, long ago, to give up hope and marry some one else. But I didn't know till this autumn, when you decided to marry Althea, I didn't know till then how much hope there was still left to be killed. When a thing like that has been killed, you see, one hasn't much feeling left for the rest of life. I don't care enough, one way or the other, not to marry as I'm doing. There is still one's life to live, and one may as well make what seems the best of it. I've not succeeded, you see, in marrying your great man, and I've fallen back very thankfully on my dear, good Franklin, who is not, let me tell you, a nonentity in my eyes; I'm fonder of him than of any one I've ever known except yourself. And it was too much, just the one touch too much, to have you come to me to-day with reproaches and an air of injury. But, at the same time, I ask your pardon for having spoken to you like that—as though you'd done me a wrong. And if I've been too cruel, if the memory rankles and makes you uncomfortable, you must keep away from me as long as you like. It won't be for ever, I'm sure. In spite of everything I'm sure that we shall always be friends.'

She got up now, knowing in her exhaustion that she was near tears, and she found her cigarette-case on the writing-table; it was an automatic relapse to the customary. She felt that everything, indeed, was over, and that the sooner one relapsed on every-day trivialities the better.

Gerald watched her light the cigarette, the pulsing little flicker of yellow flame illuminating her cheek and hair as she stood half turned from him. She was near him and he had but one step to take to her. He was almost unaware of motive. What he did was nearly as automatic, as inevitable, as her search for the cigarette. He was beside her and he put his arms around her and took the cigarette from her hand. Then, folding her to him, he hid his face against her hair.

It was, then, not excitement he felt so much as the envelopment of a great, a beautiful necessity. So great, so beautiful, in its peace and accomplishment, that it was as if he had stood there holding Helen for an eternity, and as if all the miserable years that had separated them were looked down at serenely from some far height.

And Helen had stood absolutely still. When she spoke he heard in her voice an amazement too great for anger. It was almost gentle in its astonishment. 'Gerald,' she said, 'I am not in need of consolation.'

Foolish Helen, he thought, breathing quietly in the warm dusk of her hair; foolish dear one, to speak from that realm of abolished time.

'I'm not consoling you,' he said.

She was again silent for a moment and he felt that her heart was throbbing hard; its shocks went through him. 'Let me go,' she said.

He kissed her hair, holding her closer.

Helen, starting violently, thrust him away with all her strength, and though blissfully aware only of his own interpretation, Gerald half released her, keeping her only by his clasp of her wrists.

His kiss had confirmed her incredible suspicion. 'You insult me!' she said. 'And after what I told you! What intolerable assumption! What intolerable arrogance! What baseness!'

Her eyes seemed to burn their eyelids; her face was transformed in its wild, blanched indignation.

'But I love you,' said Gerald, and he looked at her with a candour of conviction too deep for pleading.

'You love me!' Helen repeated. She could have wept for sheer fury and humiliation had not her scornful concentration on him been too intent to admit the flooding image of herself—mocked and abased by this travesty—which might have brought the fears. 'I think that you are mad.'

'But I do love you,' Gerald reiterated. 'I've been mad, if you like; but I'm quite sane now.'

'You are a simpleton,' was Helen's reply; she could find no other word for his fatuity.

'Be as cruel as you like; I know I deserve it,' said Gerald.

'You imagine I'm punishing you?'

'I don't imagine anything, or see anything, Helen, except that we love each other and that you've got to marry me.'

Helen looked deeply into his eyes, deeply and, he saw it at last, implacably. 'If your last chance hadn't been gone, can you believe that I would ever have told you? Your last chance is gone. I will never marry you.' And hearing steps outside, she twisted her hands from his, saying, 'Think of appearances, please. Here is Franklin.'



CHAPTER XXVII.

Gerald was standing at the window looking out when Franklin entered, and Helen, in the place where he had left her, met the gaze of her affianced with a firm and sombre look. There was a moment of silence while Franklin stood near the door, turning a hesitant glance from Gerald's back to Helen's face, and then Helen said, 'Gerald and I have been quarrelling.'

Franklin, feeling his way, tried to smile. 'Well, that's too bad,' he said. He looked at her for another silent moment before adding, 'Do you want to go on? Am I in the way?'

'No, I don't want to go on, and you are very welcome,' Helen answered. Her eyes were fixed on Franklin and she wondered at her own self-command, for, in his eyes, so troubled and so kindly, she seemed to see mutual memories; the memory of herself lying in the wood and saying 'I'm sick to death of it'; the memory of herself standing here and saying to him 'I'm a broken-hearted woman.' And she knew that Franklin was seeing in her face the same memories, and that, with his intuitive insight where things of the heart were concerned, he was linking them with the silent figure at the window.

'I suppose,' he said, going to the fire and standing before it, his back to the others, 'I suppose I can't help to elucidate things a little.'

'No, I think they are quite clear,' said Helen, 'or, at all events, you put an end to them by staying; especially'—and she fixed her gaze on the figure at the window—'as Gerald is going now.'

But Gerald did not move and Franklin presently remarked, 'Sometimes, you know, a third person can see things in another way and help things out. If you could just, for instance, talk the matter over quietly, before me, as a sort of adviser, you know. That might help. It's a pity for old friends to quarrel.'

Gerald turned from the window at this. He had come down from the heights and knew that he had risen there too lightly, and that the tangles of lower realities must be unravelled before he could be free to mount again—Helen with him. He knew, at last, that he had made Helen very angry and that it might take some time to disentangle things; but the radiance of the heights was with him still, and if, to Helen's eye, he looked fatuous, to Franklin, seeing his face now, for the first time, he looked radiant.

'Helen,' he said, smiling gravely at her, 'what Kane says is very sensible. He is the one person in the world one could have such things out before. Let's have them out; let's put the case to him and he shall be umpire.'

Helen bent her ironic and implacable gaze upon him and remained silent.

'You think I've no right to put it before him, I suppose.'

'You most certainly have no right. And you would gain nothing by it. What I told you just now was true.'

'I can't accept that.'

'Then you are absurd.'

'Very well, I am absurd, then. But there's one thing I have a right to tell Kane,' Gerald went on, unsmiling now. 'I owe it to him to tell him. He'll think badly of me, I know; but that can't be helped. We've all got into a dreadful muddle and the only way out of it is to be frank. So I must tell you, Kane, that Althea and I have found out that we have made a mistake; we can't hit it off. I'm not the man to make her happy and she feels it, I'm sure she feels it. It's only for my sake, I know, that she hasn't broken off long ago. You are in love with Althea, and I am in love with Helen; so there it is. I'm only saying what we are all seeing.' Gerald spoke gravely, yet at the same time with a certain blitheness, as though he took it for granted, for Franklin as well as for himself, that he thus made both their paths clear and left any hazardous element in their situations the same for both. Would Althea have Franklin and would Helen have him? This was really all that now needed elucidation.

A heavy silence followed his words. In the silence the impression that came to Gerald was as if one threw reconnoitring pebbles into a well, expecting a swift response of shallowness, and heard instead, after a wondering pause, the hollow reverberations of sombre, undreamed-of depths. Franklin's eyes were on him and Helen's eyes were on him, and he knew that in both their eyes he had proved himself once more, to say the least of it, absurd.

'Mr. Digby,' said Franklin Kane, and his voice was so strange that it sounded indeed like the fall of the stone in far-off darkness, 'perhaps you are saying what we all see; but perhaps we don't all see the same things in the same way; perhaps,' Franklin went on, finding his way, 'you don't even see some things at all.'

Gerald had flushed. 'I know I'm behaving caddishly. I've no right to say anything until I see Althea.'

'Well, perhaps not,' Franklin conceded.

'But, you know,' said Gerald, groping too, 'it's not as if it were really sudden—the Althea side of it, I mean. We've not hit it off at all. I've disappointed her frightfully; it will be a relief to her, I know—to hear'—Gerald stammered a little—'that I see now, as clearly as she does, that we couldn't be happy together. Of course,' and he grew still more red, 'it will be she who throws me over. And—I think I'd better go to her at once.'

'Wait, Gerald,' said Helen.

He paused in his precipitate dash to the door. Only her gaze, till now, had told of the chaos within her; but when Gerald said that he was going to Althea, she found words. 'Wait a moment. I don't think that you understand. I don't think, as Franklin says, that you see some things at all. Do you realise what you are doing?'

Gerald stood, his hand on the door knob, and looked at her. 'Yes; I realise it perfectly.'

'Do you realise that it will not change me and that I think you are behaving outrageously?'

'Even if it won't change you I'd have to do it now. I can't marry another woman when I'm in love with you.'

'Can't you? When you know that you can never marry me?'

'Even if I know that,' said Gerald, staring at her and, with his deepening sense of complications, looking, for him, almost stern.

'Well, know it; once for all.'

'That you won't ever forgive me?' Gerald questioned.

'Put it like that if you like to,' she answered.

Gerald turned again to go, and it was now Franklin who checked him.

'Mr. Digby—wait,' he said; 'Helen—wait.' He had been looking at them both while they interchanged their hostilities, and yet, though watching them, he had been absent, as though he were watching something else even more. 'What I mean, what I want to say, is this——' he rather stammered. 'Don't please go to Althea directly. I'm to go to her this evening. She asked me to come and see her at six.' He pulled out his watch. 'It's five now. Will you wait? Will you wait till this evening, please?'

Gerald again had deeply flushed. 'Of course, if you ask it. Only I do feel that I ought to see her, you know,' he paused, perplexed. Then, as he looked at Franklin Kane, something came to him. The cloud of his oppression seemed to pass from his face and it was once more illuminated, not with blitheness, but with recognition. He saw, he thought he saw, the way Franklin opened for them all. And his words expressed the dazzled relief of that vision. 'I see,' he said, gazing on at Franklin, 'yes, I see. Yes, if you can manage that it will be splendid of you, Kane.' Flooded with the hope of swift elucidation he seized the other's hand while he went on. 'It's been such a dreadful mess. Do forgive me. You must; you will, won't you? It may mean happiness for you, even though Helen says it can't for me. I do wish you all good fortune. And—I'll be at my club until I hear from you. And I can't say how I thank you.' With this, incoherently and rapidly pronounced, Gerald was gone and Franklin and Helen were left standing before each other.

For a long time they did not speak, but Franklin's silence seemed caused by no embarrassment. He still looked perplexed, but, through his perplexity, he looked intent, as though tracing in greater and greater clearness the path before him—the path that Gerald had seen that he was opening and that might, Gerald had said, mean happiness to them all. It was Helen watching him who felt a cruel embarrassment. She saw Franklin sacrificed and she saw herself unable to save him. It would not save him to tell him again that she would never marry Gerald. Franklin knew, too clearly for any evasion, that Althea's was the desperate case, the case for succour. She, Helen, could be thrown over—for they couldn't evade that aspect—and suffer never a scratch; but for Althea to throw over Gerald meant that in doing it she must tear her heart to pieces.

And she could not save Franklin by telling him that she had divined his love for her; that would give him all the more reason for ridding her of a husband who hadn't kept to the spirit of their contract. No, the only way to have saved him would have been to love him and to make him know and feel it; and this was the only thing she could not do for Franklin.

She took refuge in her nearest feeling, that of scorn for Gerald. 'It's unforgivable of Gerald,' she said.

Franklin's eyes—they had a deepened, ravaged look, but they were still calm—probed hers, all their intentness now for her. 'Why, no,' he said, after a moment, 'I don't see that.'

Helen, turning away, had dropped into her chair, leaning her forehead on her hand. 'I shall never forgive him,' she said.

Franklin, on the other side of the fire, stood thinking, thinking so hard that he was not allowing himself to feel. He was thinking so hard of Helen that he was unconscious how the question he now asked might affect himself. 'You do love him, Helen? It's him you've always loved?'

'Always,' she said.

'And he's found it out—only to-day.'

'He didn't find it out; I told him. He came to reproach me for my engagement.'

Franklin turned it over. 'But what he has found out, then, is that he loves you.'

'So he imagines. It's not a valuable gift, as you see, Gerald's love.'

Again Franklin paused and she knew that, for her sake, he was weighing the value of Gerald's love. And he found in answer to what she said his former words: 'Why, no, I don't see that,' he said.

'I'm afraid it's all I do see,' Helen replied.

He looked down upon her and after a silence he asked: 'May I say something?'

She nodded, resting her face in her hands.

'You're wrong, you know,' said Franklin. 'Not wrong in feeling this way now; I don't believe you can help that; but in deciding to go on feeling it. You mustn't talk about final decisions.'

'But they are made.'

'They can't be made in life. Life unmakes them, I mean, unless you set yourself against it and ruin things that might be mended.'

'I'm afraid I can't take things as you do,' said Helen. 'Some things are ruined from the very beginning.'

'Well, I don't know about that,' said Franklin; 'at all events some things aren't. And you're wrong about this thing, I'm sure of it. You're hard and you're proud, and you set yourself against life and won't let it work on you. The only way to get anything worth while out of life is to be humble with it and be willing to let it lead you, I do assure you, Helen.'

Suddenly, her face hidden in her hands, she began to cry.

'He is spoiled for me. Everything is spoiled for me,' she sobbed. 'I'd rather be proud and miserable than humiliated. Who wants a joy that is spoiled? Some things can't be joys if they come too late.'

She wept, and in the silence between them knew only her own sorrow and the bitterness of the desecration that had been wrought in her own love. Then, dimly, through her tears, she heard Franklin's voice, and heard that it trembled.

'I think they can, Helen,' he said. 'I think it's wonderful the way joy can grow if we don't set ourselves against life. I'm going to try to make it grow'—how his poor voice trembled, she was drawn from her own grief in hearing it—'and I wish I could leave you believing that you were going to try too.'

She put down her hands and lifted her strange, tear-stained face.

'You are going to Althea.'

'Yes,' said Franklin, and he smiled gently at her.

'You are going to ask her to marry you before she can know that Gerald is giving her up.'

He paused for a moment. 'I'm going to see if she needs me.'

Helen gazed at him. She couldn't see joy growing, but she saw a determination that, in its sudden strength, was almost a joy.

'And—if she doesn't need you, Franklin?'

'Ah, well,' said Franklin, continuing to smile rather fixedly, 'I've stood that, you see, for a good many years.'

Helen rose and came beside him. 'Franklin,' she said, and she took his hand, 'if she doesn't have you—you'll come back.'

'Come back?' he questioned, and she saw that all his hardly held fortitude was shaken by his wonder.

'To me,' said Helen. 'You'll marry me, if Althea won't have you. Even if she does—I'm not going to marry Gerald. So don't go to her with any mistaken ideas about me.'

He was very pale, holding her hand fast, as it held his. 'You mean—you hate him so much—for never having seen—that you'll go through with it—to punish him.'

She shook her head. 'No, I'm not so bad as that. It won't be for revenge. It will be for you—and for myself, too; because I'd rather have it so; I'd rather have you, Franklin, than the ruined thing.'

She knew that it was final and supreme temptation that she put before him, and she held it there resolved, so that if there were one chance for him he should have it. She knew that she would stand by what she said. Franklin was her pride and Gerald her humiliation; she would never accept humiliation; and though she could see Franklin go without a qualm, she could, she saw it clearly, have a welcome for him nearly as deep as love's, if he came back to her. And what she hoped, quite selflessly, was that the temptation would suffice; that he would not go to Althea. She looked into his face, and she saw that he was tormented.

'But, Helen,' he said, 'the man you love loves you; doesn't that settle everything?'

She shook her head again. 'It settles nothing. I told you that I was a woman with a broken heart. It's not mended; it never can be mended.'

'But, Helen,' he said, and a pitiful smile of supplication dawned on his ravaged little face, 'that's where you're so wrong. You've got to let it soften and then it will have to mend. It's the hard hearts that get broken.'

'Well, mine is hard.'

'Let it melt, Helen,' he pleaded with her, 'please let it melt. Please let yourself be happy, dear Helen.'

But still she shook her head, looking deeply at him, and in the negation, in the look, it was as if she held her cup of magic steadily before him. She was there, for him, if he would have her. She kept him to his word for his sake; but she kept him to his word for hers, too. Yes, he saw that though it was for his sake, it was not for his alone—there was the final magic—that her eyes met his in that long, clear look. It was the nearest he would ever come to Helen; it was the most she could ever do for him; and, with a pang, deep and piercing, he felt all that it meant, and felt his love of her avowed in his own eyes, and recognised, received in hers. Helplessly, now, he looked at her, his lips pressed together so that they should not show their trembling, and only a little muscle in his cheek quivering irrepressibly. And he faltered: 'Helen—you could never love me back.'

'Not in that way,' said Helen. She was grave and clear; she had not a hesitation. 'But that way is ruined and over for me. I could live for you, though. I could make it worth your while.'

He looked, and he could say nothing. Against his need of Helen he must measure Althea's need of him. He must measure, too—ah, cruel perplexity—the chance for Helen's happiness. She was unhesitating; but how could she know herself so inflexible, how could she know that the hard heart might not melt? For the sake of Helen's happiness he must measure not only Gerald's need of her against his own and Gerald's power against his own mere pitifulness, but he must wonder, in an agony of sudden surmise, which, in the long-run, could give her most, the loved or the unloved man. In all his life no moment had ever equalled this in its fulness, and its intensity, and its pain. It thundered, it rushed, it darkened—like the moment of death by drowning and like the great river that bears away the drowning man. Memories flashed in it, broken and vivid—of Althea's eyes and Helen's smile; Althea so appealing, Helen so strong; and, incongruous in its remoteness, a memory of the bleak, shabby little street in a Boston suburb, the small wooden house painted brown, where he was born, where scanty nasturtiums flowered on the fence in summer, and in winter, by the light of a lamp with a ground glass shade, his mother's face, careful, worn, and gentle, bent over the family mending. Where, indeed, had the river borne him, and what had been done to him?

Helen's voice came to him, and Helen's face reshaped itself—a strange and lovely beacon over the engulfing waters. She saw his torment and she understood. 'Go to her if you must,' she said; 'and I know that you must. But don't go with mistaken ideas. Remember what I tell you. Nothing is changed—for me, or in me. If Althea doesn't want you back—or if Althea does want you back—I shall be waiting.' And, seeing his extremity, Helen, grave and clear, filled her cup of magic to the brim. As she had said that morning, she said now—but with what a difference: 'Kiss me good-bye, Franklin.'