He could not move towards her; he could not kiss her; but, smiling more tenderly than he could have thought Helen would ever smile, she put her arms around him and drew his rapt, transfigured face to hers. And holding him tenderly, she kissed him and said: 'Whatever happens—you've had the best of me.'



CHAPTER XXVIII.

Althea, since the misty walk with Gerald, had been plunged in a pit of mental confusion. She swung from accepted abasement to the desperate thought of the magnanimity in such abasement; she dropped from this fragile foothold to burning resentment, and, seeing where resentment must lead her, she turned again and clasped, with tight-closed eyes, the love that, looked upon, could not be held without humiliation. Self-doubt and self-analysis had brought her to this state of pitiful chaos. The only self left seemed centred in her love; if she did not give up Gerald, what was left her but accepted abasement? If she let him go, it would be to own to herself that she had failed to hold him, to see herself as a nonentity. Yet, to go on clinging, what would that show? Only with closed eyes could she cling. To open them for the merest glimmer was to see that she was, indeed, nothing, if she had not strength to relinquish a man who did not any longer, in any sense, wish to make her his wife. With closed eyes one might imagine that it was strength that clung; with open eyes one saw that it was weakness.

Miss Harriet Robinson, all alert gaiety and appreciation, had arrived at Merriston on Saturday, had talked all through Sunday, and had come up to London with Althea and Gerald on Monday morning. Gerald had gone to a smoking-carriage, and Althea had hardly exchanged a word with him. She and Miss Robinson went to a little hotel in Mayfair, a hotel supposed to atone for its costliness and shabbiness by some peculiar emanation of British comfort. Americans of an earnest, if luxurious type, congregated there and found a satisfactory local flavour in worn chintzes and uneven passages. Lady Blair had kindly pressed Althea to stay with her in South Kensington and be married from her house; but even a week ago, when this plan had been suggested, Althea had shrunk from it. It had seemed, even then, too decisive. Once beneath Lady Blair's quasi-maternal roof one would be propelled, like a labelled parcel, resistlessly to the altar. Even then Althea had felt that the little hotel in Mayfair, with its transient guests and impersonal atmosphere, offered further breathing space for indefiniteness.

She was thankful indeed for breathing space as, on the afternoon of her arrival, she sat sunken in a large chair and felt, as one relief, that she would not see Miss Robinson again until evening. It had been tormenting, all the journey up, to tear herself from her own sick thoughts and to answer Miss Robinson's unsuspecting comments and suggestions.

Miss Robinson was as complacent and as beaming as though she had herself 'settled' Althea. She richly embroidered the themes, now so remote, that had once occupied poor Althea's imagination—house-parties at Merriston; hostess-ship on a large scale in London; Gerald's seat in Parliament taken as a matter-of-course. Althea, feeling the intolerable irony, had attempted vague qualifications; Gerald did not care for politics; she herself preferred a quieter life; they probably could not afford a town house. But to such disclaimers Miss Robinson opposed the brightness of her faith in her friend's capacities. 'Ah, my dear, it's your very reticence, your very quietness, that will tell. Once settled—I've always felt it of you—you will make your place—and your place can only be a big one. My only regret is that you won't get your wedding-dress in Paris—oh yes, I know that they have immensely improved over here; but, for cut and cachet, Paris is still the only place.'

This had all been tormenting, and Miss Buckston's presence at lunch had been something of a refuge—Miss Buckston, far more interested in her Bach choir practice than in Althea's plans, and lending but a preoccupied attention to Miss Robinson's matrimonial talk. Miss Buckston, at a glance, had dismissed Miss Robinson as frothy and shallow. They were both gone now, thank goodness. Lady Blair would not descend upon her till next morning, and Sally and Mrs. Peel were not due in London until the end of the week. Althea sat, her head leaning back, her eyes closed, and wondered whether Gerald would come and see her. He had parted from her at the station, and the memory of his face, courteous, gentle, yet so unseeing, made her feel like weeping piteously. She spent the afternoon in the chair, her eyes closed and an electric excitement of expectancy tingling through her, and Gerald did not come. He did not come that evening, and the evening passed like a phantasmagoria—the dinner in the sober little dining-room, Miss Robinson, richly dressed, opposite her; and the hours in her drawing-room afterwards, she and Miss Robinson on either side of the fire, quietly conversing. And next morning there was no word from him. It was then, as she lay in bed and felt the tears, though she did not sob, roll down over her cheeks upon the pillow, that sudden strength came with sudden revolt. A revulsion against her suffering and the cause of it went through her, and she seemed to shake off a torpor, an obsession, and to re-enter some moral heritage from which, for months, her helpless love had shut her out.

Lying there, her cheeks still wet but her eyes now stern and steady, she felt herself sustained, as if by sudden wings, at a vertiginous height from which she looked down upon herself and upon her love. What had it been, that love? what was it but passion pure and simple, the craving feminine thing, enmeshed in charm. To a woman of her training, her tradition, must not a love that could finally satisfy her nature, its deeps and heights, be a far other love; a love of spirit rather than of flesh? What was all the pain that had warped her for so long but the inevitable retribution for her back-sliding? Old adages came to her, aerial Emersonian faiths. Why, one was bound and fettered if feeling was to rule one and not mind. Friendship, deep, spiritual congeniality, was the real basis for marriage, not the enchantment of the heart and senses. She had been weak and dazzled; she had followed the will-o'-the-wisp—and see, see the bog where it had led her.

She saw it now, still sustained above it and looking down. Her love for Gerald was not a high thing; it called out no greatness in her; appealed to none; there was no spiritual congeniality between them. In the region of her soul he was, and would always remain, a stranger.

Sure of this at last, she rose and wrote to Franklin, swiftly and urgently. She did not clearly know what she wanted of him; but she felt, like a flame of faith within her, that he, and he only, could sustain her at her height. He was her spiritual affinity; he was her wings. Merely to see him, merely to steep herself in the radiance of his love and sympathy, would be to recover power, poise, personality, and independence. It was a goal she flew towards, though she saw it but in dizzy glimpses, and as if through vast hallucinations of space.

She told Franklin to come at six. She gave herself one more day; for what she could not have said. A lightness of head seemed to swim over her, and a loss of breath, when she tried to see more clearly the goal, or what might still capture and keep her from it.

She told Amelie that she had a bad headache and would spend the day on her sofa, denying herself to Lady Blair; and all day long she lay there with tingling nerves and a heavily beating heart—poor heart, what was happening to it in its depths she could not tell—and Gerald did not write or come.

At tea-time Miss Robinson could not be avoided. She tip-toed in and sat beside her sofa commenting compassionately on her pallor. 'I do so beg you to go straight to bed, dear,' she said. 'Let me give you some sal volatile; there is nothing better for a headache.'

But Althea, smiling heroically, said that she must stay up to see Franklin Kane. 'He wants to see me, and will be here at six. After he is gone I will go to bed.' She did not know why she should thus arrange facts a little for Miss Robinson; but all her nature was stretched on its impulse towards safety, and it was automatically that she adjusted facts to that end. After the first great moment of enfranchisement and soaring, it was like relapsing to some sub-conscious function of the organism—digestion or circulation—that did things for one if one didn't interfere with it. Her mind no longer directed her course except in this transformed and subsidiary guise; it had become part of the machinery of self-preservation.

'You really are an angel, my dear,' said Miss Robinson. 'You oughtn't to allow your devotees to accaparer you like this. You will wear yourself out.'

Althea, with a smile still more heroic, said that dear Franklin could never wear her out; and Miss Robinson, not to be undeceived, shook her head, while retiring to make room for the indiscreet friend.

When she was gone, Althea got up and took her place in the chintz chair where she had waited for so long yesterday.

Outside, a foggy day closed to almost opaque obscurity. The fire burned brightly, there were candles on the mantelpiece and a lamp on the table, yet the encompassing darkness seemed to have entered the room. After the aerial heights of the morning it was now at a corresponding depth, as if sunken to the ocean-bed, that she seemed to sit and wait, and feel, in a trance-like pause, deep, essential forces working. And she remembered the sunny day in Paris, and the other hotel drawing-room where, empty and aimless, she had sat, only six months ago. How much had come to her since then; through how much hope and life had she lived, to what heights been lifted, to what depths struck down. And now, once more she sat, bereft of everything, and waiting for she knew not what.

Franklin appeared almost to the moment. Althea had not seen him since leaving London some weeks before, and at the first glance he seemed to her in some way different. She had only time to think, fleetingly, of all that had happened to Franklin since she had last seen him, all the strange, new things that Helen must have meant to him; and the thought, fleeting though it was, made more urgent the impulse that pressed her on. For, after all, the second glance showed him as so much the same, the same to the unbecomingness of his clothes, the flatness of his features, the general effect of decision and placidity that he always, predominatingly, gave.

It was on Franklin's sameness that she leaned. It was Franklin's sameness that was her goal; she trusted it like the ground beneath her feet. She went to him and put out her hands. 'Dear Franklin,' she said, 'I am so glad to see you.'

He took her hands and held them while he looked into her eyes. The face she lifted to him was a woeful one, in spite of the steadying of its pale lips to a smile. It was not enfranchisement and the sustained height that he saw—it was fear and desolation; they looked at him out of her large, sad eyes and they were like an uttered cry. He saw her need, worse still, he saw her trust; and yet, ah yet, his hope, his unacknowledged hope, the hope which Helen's magic had poured into his veins, pulsed in him. He saw her need, but as he looked, full of compassion and solicitude, he was hoping that her need was not of him.

Suddenly Althea burst into sobs. She leaned her face against his shoulder, her hands still held in his, and she wept out: 'O Franklin, I had to send for you—you are my only friend—I am so unhappy, so unhappy.' Franklin put an arm around her, still holding her hand, and he slightly patted her back as she leaned upon him. 'Poor Althea, poor dear,' he said.

'Oh, what shall I do, Franklin?' she whispered.

'Tell me all about it,' said Franklin. 'Tell me what's the matter.'

She paused for a moment, and in the pause her thoughts, released for that one instant from their place of servitude, scurried through the inner confusion. His tone, the quietness, kindness, rationality of it, seemed to demand reason, not impulse, from her, the order of truth and not the chaos of feeling. But pain and fear had worked for too long upon her, and she did not know what truth was. All she knew was that he was near, and tender and compassionate, and to know that seemed to be knowing at last that here was the real love, the love of spirit from which she had turned to lower things. Impulse, not insincere, surged up, and moved by it alone she sobbed on, 'O Franklin, I have made a mistake, a horrible, horrible mistake. It's killing me. I can't go on. I don't love him, Franklin—I don't love Gerald—I can't marry him. And how can I tell him? How can I break faith with him?'

Franklin stood very still, his hand clasping hers, the other ceasing its rhythmic, consolatory movement. He held her, this woman whom he had loved for so many years, and over her bent head he looked before him at the frivolous and ugly wall-paper, a chaos of festooned chrysanthemums on a bright pink ground. He gazed at the chrysanthemums, and he wondered, with a direful pang, whether Althea were consciously lying to him.

She sobbed on: 'Even in the first week, I knew that something was wrong. Of course I was in love—but it was only that—there was nothing else except being in love. Doubts gnawed at me from the first; I couldn't bear to accept them; I hoped on and on. Only in this last week I've seen that I can't—I can't marry him. Oh——' and the wail was again repeated, 'what shall I do, Franklin?'

He spoke at last, and in the disarray of her sobbing and darkened condition—her face pressed against him, her ears full of the sound of her own labouring breath—she could not know to the full how strange his voice was, though she felt strangeness and caught her breath to listen.

'Don't take it like this, Althea,' he said. 'It's not so bad as all this. It can all be made right. You must just tell him the truth and set him free.'

And now there was a strange silence. He was waiting, and she was waiting too; she stilled her breath and he stilled his; all each heard was the beating of his and her own heart. And the silence, to Althea, was full of a new and formless fear, and to Franklin of an acceptation sad beyond all the sadnesses of his life. Even before Althea spoke, and while the sweet, the rapturous, the impossible hope softly died away, he knew in his heart, emptied of magic, that it was he Althea needed.

She spoke at last, in a changed and trembling voice; it pierced him, for he felt the new fear in it: 'How can I tell him the truth, Franklin?' she said. 'How can I tell you the truth? How can I say that I turned from the real thing, the deepest, most beautiful thing in my life—and hurt it, broke it, put it aside, so blind, so terribly blind I was—and took the unreal thing? How can I ever forgive myself—but, O Franklin, much, much more, how can you ever forgive me?' her voice wailed up, claiming him supremely.

She believed it to be the truth, and he saw that she believed it. He saw, sadly, clearly, that among all the twistings and deviations of her predicament, one thing held firm for her, so firm that it had given her this new faith in herself—her faith in his supreme devotion. And he saw that he owed it to her. He had given it to her, he had made it her possession, to trust to as she trusted to the ground under her feet, ever since they were boy and girl together. Six months ago it would have been with joy, and with joy only, that he would have received her, and have received the gift of her bruised, uncertain heart. Six months—why only a week ago he would have thought that it could only be with joy.

So now he found his voice and he knew that it was nearly his old voice for her, and he said, in answer to that despairing statement that wailed for contradiction: 'Oh no, Althea, dear. Oh no, you haven't wrecked our lives.'

'But you are bound now,' she hardly audibly faltered. 'You have another life opening before you. You can't come back now.'

'No, Althea,' Franklin repeated, and he stroked her shoulder again. 'I can come back, if you want me. And you do want me, don't you, dear? You will let me try to make you happy?'

She put back her head to look at him, her poor face, tear-stained, her eyes wild with their suffering, and he saw the new fear in them, the formless fear. 'O Franklin,' she said, and the question was indeed a strange one to be asked by her of him: 'do you love me?'

And now, pierced by his pity, Franklin could rise to all she needed of him. The old faith sustained him, too. One didn't love some one for all one's life like that, to be left quite dispossessed. Many things were changed, but many still held firm; and though, deep in his heart, sick with its relinquishment, Helen's words seemed to whisper, 'Some things can't be joys when they come too late,' he could answer himself as he had answered her, putting away the irony and scepticism of disenchantment—'It's wonderful the way joy can grow,' and draw strength for himself and for his poor Althea from that act of affirmation.

'Why, of course I love you, Althea, dear,' he said. 'How can you ask me that? I've always loved you, haven't I? You knew I did, didn't you, or else you wouldn't have sent? You knew I wasn't bound if you were free. I understand it all.' And smiling at her so that she should forget for ever that she had had a new fear, he added, 'And see here, dear, you mustn't delay a moment in letting Gerald know. Come, write him a note now, and I'll have it sent to his club so that he shall hear right away.'



CHAPTER XXIX.

Helen woke next morning after unbroken, heavy slumbers, with a mind as vague and empty as a young child's. All night long she had been dreaming strange, dreary dreams of her youth. There had been no pain in them, or fear, only a sad lassitude, as of one who, beaten and weary, looks back from a far distance at pain and fear outlived. And lying in her bed, inert and placid, she felt as if she had been in a great battle, and that after the annihilation of anaesthetics she had waked to find herself with limbs gone and wounds bandaged, passive and acquiescent, in a world from which all large issues had been eliminated for ever.

It was the emptiest kind of life on which her eyes opened so quietly this morning. She was not even to be life's captive. The little note which had come to her last night from Franklin and now lay beside her bed had told her that. He had told her that Althea had taken him back, and he had only added, 'Thank you, dear Helen, for all that you have given me and all that you were willing to give.'

In the overpowering sense of sadness that had been the last of the day's great emotions Helen had found no mitigation of relief for her own escape. That she had escaped made only an added bitterness. And even sadness seemed to be a memory this morning, and the relief that came, profound and almost sweet, was in the sense of having passed away from feeling. She had felt too much; though, had life been in her with which to think or feel, she could have wept over Franklin.

Sometimes she closed her eyes, too much at peace for a smile; sometimes she looked quietly about her familiar little room, above Aunt Grizel's, and showing from its windows only a view of the sky and of the chimney-pots opposite, a room oddly empty of associations and links; no photographs, few books, few pictures; only the vase of flowers she liked always to have near her; her old Bible and prayer-book and hymnal, battered by years rather than by use, for religion held no part at all in Helen's life; and two faded prints of seventeenth-century battleships, sailing in gallant squadrons on a silvery sea. These had hung in Helen's schoolroom, and she had always been fond of them. The room was symbolic of her life, so insignificant in every outer contact, so centred, in her significant self, on its one deep preoccupation. But there was no preoccupation now. Gerald's image passed before her and meant nothing more than the other things she looked at, while her mind drifted like an aimless butterfly from the flowers and the prints to the pretty old mirror—a gift of Gerald's—and hovered over the graceful feminine objects scattered upon the chairs and tables. The thought of Gerald stirred nothing more than a mild wonder. What a strange thing, her whole life hanging on this man, coloured, moulded by him. What did such a feeling mean? and what had she really wanted of Gerald more than he had given? She wanted nothing now.

It was with an effort—a painful, dragging effort—that she roused herself to talk to Aunt Grizel, who appeared at the same time as her breakfast. Not that she needed to act placidity and acquiescence before Aunt Grizel; she felt them too deeply to need to act; the pain, perhaps, came from having nothing else with which to meet her.

Aunt Grizel was amazed, distressed, nearly indignant; she only was not indignant because of a pity that perplexed even while it soothed her. She, too, had had a letter from Franklin that morning, and only that morning had heard of the broken engagement and of how Franklin faced it. She did not offer to show Helen Franklin's letter, which she held in her hand, emphasising her perplexity by doubling it over and slapping her palm with it. 'She sent for him, then.' It was on Althea that she longed to discharge her smothered anger.

Helen was ready for her; to have to be so ready was part of the pain. 'Well, in a sense perhaps, it was all she could do, wasn't it? when she found that she couldn't go on with Gerald, and really wanted Franklin at last.'

'Rather late in the day to come to that conclusion when Mr. Kane was engaged to another woman.'

'Well—he was engaged to another woman only because Althea wouldn't have him.'

'Oh!—Ah!' Aunt Grizel was non-committal on this point. 'She lets him seem to jilt you.'

'Perhaps she does.' Helen's placidity was profound.

'I know Mr. Kane, he wouldn't have been willing to do that unless pressure had been brought to bear.'

'Pressure was, I suppose; the pressure of his own feeling and of Althea's unhappiness. He saw that his chance had come and he had to take it. He couldn't go on and marry me, could he, Aunt Grizel? when he saw the chance had come for him to take,' said Helen reasonably.

'Well,' said Aunt Grizel, 'the main point isn't, of course, what the people who know of your engagement will think—we don't mind that. What we want to decide on is what we think ourselves. I keep my own counsel, for I know you'd rather I did, and you keep yours. But what about this money? He writes to me that he wants me to take over from him quite a little fortune, so that when I die I can leave you about a thousand a year. He has thought it out; it isn't too much and it isn't too little. He is altogether a remarkable man; his tact never fails him. Of course it's nothing compared with what he wanted to do for you; but at the same time it's so much that, to put it brutally, you get for nothing the safety I wanted you to marry him to get.'

Helen's delicate and weary head now turned on its pillow to look at Aunt Grizel. They looked at each other for some time in silence, and in the silence they took counsel together. After the interchange Helen could say, smiling a little, 'We mustn't put it brutally; that is the one thing we must never do. Not only for his sake,' she wanted Aunt Grizel to see it clearly, 'but for mine.'

'How shall we put it, then? It's hardly a possible thing to accept, yet, if he hadn't believed you would let him make you safe, would he have gone back to Miss Jakes? One sees his point.'

'We mustn't put it brutally, because it isn't true,' said Helen, ignoring this last inference. 'I couldn't let you take it for me unless I cared very much for him; and I care so much that I can't take it.'

Aunt Grizel was silent for another moment. 'I see: it's because it's all you can do for him now.'

'All that he can do for me, now,' Helen just corrected her.

'Wasn't it all he ever could do, and more? He makes you safe—of course it's not what I wanted for you, but it's part of it—he makes you safe and he removes himself.'

Aunt Grizel saw the truth so clearly that Helen could allow her to seem brutal. 'It's only because we could both do a good deal for each other that doing this is possible,' she said.

She then roused herself to pour out her coffee and butter her toast, and Miss Buchanan sat in silence beside her, tapping Franklin Winslow Kane's letter on her palm from time to time. And at last she brought out her final decision. 'When I write to him and tell him that I accept, I shall tell him too, that I'm sorry.'

'Sorry? For what?' Helen did not quite follow her.

'That it's all he can do now,' said Aunt Grizel; 'that he is removing himself.'

It was her tribute to Franklin, and Helen, even for the sake of all the delicate appearances, couldn't protest against such a tribute. She was glad that Franklin was to know, from Aunt Grizel, that he, himself, was regretted. So that she said, 'Yes; I'm glad you can tell him that.'

It was at this moment of complete understanding that the maid came in and said that Mr. Digby was downstairs and wanted to see Miss Helen. He would wait as long as she liked. There was then a little pause, and Aunt Grizel saw a greater weariness pass over her niece's face.

'Very well,' she spoke for her to the maid. 'Tell Mr. Digby that some one will be with him directly,' and, as the door closed: 'You're not fit to see him this morning, Helen,' she said; 'not fit to pour balms into his wounds. Let me do it for you.'

Helen lay gazing before her, and she was still silent. She did not know what she wanted; but she did know that she did not want to see Gerald. The thought of seeing him was intolerable. 'Will you pour balms?' she said. 'I'm afraid you are not too sorry for Gerald.'

'Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not,' said Aunt Grizel, smiling a little grimly. 'He takes things too easily, and I confess that it does rather please me to see him, for once in his life, "get left." He needed to "get left."'

'Well, you won't tell him that, if I let you go to him instead of me? You will be nice to him?'

'Oh, I'll be nice enough. I'll condole with him.'

'Tell him,' said Helen, as Aunt Grizel moved resolutely to the door, 'that I can't see anybody; not for a long time. I shall go away, I think.'



CHAPTER XXX.

Miss Grizel had known Gerald all his life, and yet she was not intimate with him, and during the years that Helen had lived with her she had come to feel a certain irritation against him. Her robust and caustic nature had known no touch of jealousy for the place he held in Helen's life. It was dispassionately that she observed, and resented on Helen's account, the exacting closeness of a friendship with a man who, she considered, was not worth so much time and attention. She suspected nothing of the hidden realities of Helen's feeling, yet she did suspect, acutely, that, had it not been for Gerald, Helen might have had more time for other things. It was Gerald who monopolised and took for granted. He came, and Helen was always ready. Miss Grizel had not liked Gerald to be so assured. She was pleased, now, in going downstairs, that Gerald Digby should find, for once, and at a moment of real need, that Helen could not see him.

He was standing before the fire, his eyes on the door, and as she looked at him Miss Grizel experienced a certain softening of mood. She decided that she had, to some extent, misjudged Gerald; he had, then, capacity for caring deeply. Miss Jakes's defection had knocked him about badly. There was kindness in her voice as she said: 'Good morning,' and gave him her hand.

But Gerald was not thinking of her or of her kindness. 'Where is Helen?' he asked, shaking and then automatically retaining her hand.

'You can't see Helen to-day,' said Miss Grizel, a little nettled by the open indifference. 'She is not at all well. This whole affair, as you may imagine, has been singularly painful for her to go through. She asks me to tell you that she can see nobody for a long time. We are going away; we are going to the Riviera,' said Miss Grizel, making the resolve on the spot.

Gerald held her hand and looked at her with a feverish unseeing gaze. 'I must see Helen,' he said.

'My dear Gerald,' Miss Grizel disengaged her hand and went to a chair, 'this really isn't an occasion for musts. Helen has had a shock as well as you, and you certainly shan't see her.'

'Does she say I shan't?'

Miss Grizel's smile was again grim. 'She says you shan't, and so do I. She's not fit to see anybody.'

Gerald looked at her for another moment and then turned to the writing-table. 'I beg your pardon; I don't mean to be rude. Only I really must see her. Do you mind my writing a line? Will you have it taken to her?'

'Certainly,' said Miss Grizel, compressing her lips.

Gerald sat down and wrote, quickly, yet carefully, pausing between the sentences and fixing the same unseeing gaze on the garden. He then rose and gave the note to Miss Grizel, who, ringing, gave it to the maid, after which she and Gerald remained sitting on opposite sides of the room in absolute silence for quite a long while.

Gerald's note had been short. 'Don't be so unspeakably cruel,' it ran, without preamble. 'You know, don't you, that it has all turned out perfectly? Althea has thrown me over and taken Kane. I've made them happy at all events. As for us—O Helen, you must see me. I can't wait. I can't wait for an hour. I beseech you to come. Only let me see you.—GERALD.'

To this appeal the maid presently brought the answer, which Gerald, oblivious of Miss Grizel's scrutiny, tore open and read.

'Don't make me despise you, Gerald. You come because of what I told you yesterday, and I told you because it was over, so that you insult me by coming. You must believe me when I say that it is over, and until you can meet me as if you had forgotten, I cannot see you. I will not see you now. I do not want to see you.—HELEN.'

He read this, and Miss Grizel saw the blood surge into his face. He leaned back in his chair, crumpled Helen's note in his fingers, and looked out of the window. Again Miss Grizel was sorry for him, though with her sympathy there mingled satisfaction. Presently Gerald looked at her, and it was as if he were, at last, aware of her. He looked for a long time, and suddenly, like some one spent and indifferent, he said, offering his explanation: 'You see—I'm in love with Helen—and she won't have me.'

Miss Grizel gasped and gazed. 'In love with Helen? You?' she repeated. The gold locket on her ample bosom had risen with her astounded breath.

'Yes,' said Gerald, 'and she won't have me.'

'But Miss Jakes?' said Miss Grizel.

'She is in love with Kane, and Kane with her—as he always has been, you know. They are all right. Everything is all right, except Helen.'

A queer illumination began to shoot across Miss Grizel's stupor.

'Perhaps you told Helen that you loved her before Miss Jakes threw you over. Perhaps you told Mr. Kane that Miss Jakes loved him before she threw you over. Perhaps it's you who have upset the apple-cart.'

'I suppose it is,' said Gerald, gloomily, but without contrition. 'I thought it would bring things right to have the facts out. It has brought them right—for Althea and Kane; they will be perfectly happy together.'

This simplicity, in the face of her own deep knowledge—the knowledge she had built on in sending for Franklin Kane a week ago—roused a ruthless ire in Miss Grizel. 'I'm afraid that you've let your own wishes sadly deceive you,' she said. 'I must tell you, since you evidently don't know it, that Mr. Kane is in love with Helen; deeply in love with her. From what I understand of the situation you have sacrificed him to your own feeling, and perhaps sacrificed Miss Jakes too; but I don't go into that.'

It was now Gerald's turn to gaze and gasp; he did not gasp, however; he only gazed—gazed with a gaze no longer inward and unseeing. He was, at last, seeing everything. He fell back on the one most evident thing he saw, and had from the beginning seen. 'But Helen—she could never have loved him. Such a marriage would be unfit for Helen. I'm not excusing myself. I see I've been an unpardonable fool in one way.'

Miss Grizel's ire increased. 'Unfit for Helen? Why, pray? He would have given her the position of a princess—in our funny modern sense. I intended, and I made the marriage. I saw he'd fallen in love with her—dear little man—though at the time he didn't know it himself. And since then I've had the satisfaction—one of the greatest of my life—of seeing how happy I had made both of them. It was obvious, touchingly so, that he was desperately in love with Helen. Yes, Gerald, don't come to me for sympathy and help. You've wrecked a thing I had set my heart on. You've wrecked Mr. Kane, and my opinion is that you've wrecked Helen too.'

Gerald, who had become very pale, kept his eyes on her, and he went back to his one foothold in a rocking world. 'Helen could never have loved him.'

Miss Grizel shook her hand impatiently above her knee. 'Love! Love! What do you all mean with your love, I'd like to know? What's this sudden love of yours for Helen, you who, until yesterday, were willing to marry another woman for her money—or were you in love with her too? What's Miss Jakes's love of Mr. Kane, who, until a week ago, thought herself in love with you? And you may well ask me what is Mr. Kane's love of Helen, who, until a week ago, thought himself in love with Miss Jakes? But there I answer you that he is the only one of you who seems to me to know what love is. One can respect his feeling; it means more than himself and his own emotions. It means something solid and dependable. Helen recognised it, and Helen's feeling for him—though it certainly wasn't love in your foolish sense—was something that she valued more than anything you can have to offer her. And I repeat, though I'm sorry to pain you, that it is clear to me that you have wrecked her life as well as Mr. Kane's.'

Miss Grizel had had her say. She stood up, her lips compressed, her eyes weighty with their hard, good sense. And Gerald rose, too. He was at a disadvantage, and an unfair one, but he did not think of that. He thought, with stupefaction, of what he had done in this room the day before to Franklin and to Helen. In the depths of his heart he couldn't wish it undone, for he couldn't conceive of himself now as married to Althea, nor could he, in spite of Miss Grizel's demonstrations, conceive of Helen as married to Franklin Kane. But with all the depths of his heart he wished what he had done, done differently. And although he couldn't conceive of Helen as married to Franklin Kane, although he couldn't accept Miss Grizel's account of her state as final, nor believe her really wrecked—since, after all, she loved him, not Franklin—he could clearly conceive from Miss Grizel's words that by doing it as he had, he had wrecked many things and endangered many. What these things were her words only showed him confusedly, and his clearest impulse now was to see just what they were, to see just what he had done. Miss Grizel couldn't show him, for Miss Grizel didn't know the facts; Helen would not show him, she refused to see him; his mind leaped at once, as he rose and stood looking rather dazedly about before going, to Franklin Kane. Kane, as he had said yesterday, was the one person in the world before whom one could have such things out. Even though he had wrecked Kane, Kane was still the only person he could turn to. And since he had wrecked him in his ignorance he felt that now, in his enlightenment, he owed him something infinitely delicate and infinitely deep in the way of apology.

'Well, thank you,' he said, grasping Miss Grizel's hand. 'You had to say it, and it had to be said. Good-bye.'

Miss Grizel, not displeased with his fashion of taking her chastisement, returned his grasp. 'Yes,' she said, 'you couldn't go on as you were. But all the same, I'm sorry for you.'

'Oh,' Gerald smiled a little. 'I don't suppose you've much left for me, and no wonder.'

'Oh yes, I've plenty left for you,' said Miss Grizel. And, in thinking over his expression as he had left her, the smile, its self-mockery, yet its lack of bitterness, his courage, and yet the frankness of his disarray, she felt that she liked Gerald more than she had ever liked him.



CHAPTER XXXI.

'Why, yes, of course I can see you. Do sit down.' Franklin spoke gravely, scanning his visitor's face while he moved piles of pamphlets from a chair and pushed aside the books and papers spread before him on the table.

Gerald had found him, after a fruitless morning call, at his lodgings in Clarges Street, and Franklin, in the dim little sitting-room, had risen from the work that, for hours, had given him a feeling of anchorage—not too secure—in a world where many of his bearings were painfully confused. Seeing him so occupied, Gerald, in the doorway, had hesitated: 'Am I interrupting you? Shall I come another time? I want very much to see you, if I may.' And Franklin had replied with his quick reassurance, too kindly for coldness, yet too grave for cordiality.

Gerald sat down at the other side of the table and glanced at the array of papers spread upon it. They gave him a further sense of being beyond his depth. It was like seeing suddenly the whole bulk of some ocean craft, of which before one had noticed only the sociable and very insignificant decks and riggings, lifted, for one's scientific edification, in its docks. All the laborious, underlying meaning of Franklin's life was symbolised in these neat papers and heavy books. Gerald tried to remember, with only partial success, what Franklin's professional interests were; people's professional interests had rarely engaged his attention. It was queer to realise that the greater part of Franklin Kane's life was something entirely alien from his own imagination, and Gerald felt, as we have said, beyond his depth in realising it. Yet the fact of a significance he had no power of gauging did not disconcert him; he was quite willing to swim as best he could and even to splash grotesquely; quite willing to show Franklin Kane that he was very helpless and very ignorant, and could only appeal for mercy.

'Please be patient with me if I make mistakes,' he said. 'I probably shall make mistakes; please bear with me.'

Franklin, laying one pamphlet on another, did not reply to this, keeping only his clear, kind gaze responsively on the other's face.

'In the first place,' said Gerald, looking down and reaching out for a thick blue pencil which he seemed to examine while he spoke, 'I must ask your pardon. I made a terrible fool of myself yesterday afternoon. As you said, there were so many things I didn't see. I do see them now.'

He lifted his eyes from the pencil, and Franklin, after meeting them for a moment, said gently: 'Well, there isn't much good in looking at them, is there? As for asking my pardon—you couldn't have helped not knowing those things.'

'Perhaps I ought to have guessed them, but I didn't. I was able to play the fool in perfect good faith.'

'Well, I don't know about that; I don't know that you played the fool,' said Franklin.

'My second point is this,' said Gerald. 'Of course I'm not going to pretend anything. You know that I love Helen and that I believe she loves me, and that for that reason I've a right to seem silly and fatuous and do my best to get her. I quite see what you must both of you have thought of me yesterday. I quite see that she couldn't stand my blindness—to all you meant and felt, you know, and then my imagining that everything could be patched up between her and me. She wants me to feel my folly to the full, and no wonder. But that sort of bitterness would have to go down where people love—wouldn't it? it's something that can be got over. But that's what I want to ask you; perhaps I'm more of a fool than I yet know; perhaps what her aunt tells me is true; perhaps I've wrecked Helen as well as wrecked you. It's a very queer question to ask—and you must forgive me—no one can answer it but you, except Helen, and Helen won't see me. Do you really think I have wrecked her?'

Everybody seemed to be asking this question of poor Franklin. He gave it his attention in this, its new application, and before answering, he asked:

'What's happened since I saw you?'

Gerald informed him of the events of the morning.

'I suppose,' said Franklin, reflecting, 'that you shouldn't have gone so soon. You ought to have given her more time to adjust herself. It looked a little too sure, didn't it? as if you felt that now that you'd settled matters satisfactorily you could come and claim her.'

'I know now what it looked like,' said Gerald; 'but, you see, I didn't know this morning. And I was sure, I am sure,' he said, fixing his charming eyes sadly and candidly upon Franklin, 'that Helen and I belong to one another.'

Franklin continued to reflect. 'Well, yes, I understand that,' he said. 'But how can you make her feel it? Why weren't you sure long ago?'

'Oh, you ask me again why I was a fool,' said Gerald gloomily, 'and I can only reply that Helen was too clever. After all, falling in love is suddenly seeing something and wanting something, isn't it? Well, Helen never let me see and never let me want.'

'Yes, that's just the trouble. She's let you see, so that you do want, now. But that can't be very satisfactory to her, can it?' said Franklin, with all his impartiality.

'Of course it can't!' said Gerald, with further gloom. 'And don't, please, imagine that I'm idiotic enough to think myself satisfactory. My only point is that I belong to her, unsatisfactory as I am, and that, unless I've really wrecked her, and myself—I must be able to make her feel that it's her point too; that other things can't really count, finally, beside it. Have I wrecked her?' Gerald repeated. 'I mean, would she have been really happier with you? Forgive me for asking you such a question.'

Franklin again resumed his occupation of laying the pamphlets of one pile neatly upon those of the other. He had all his air of impartial reflection, yet his hand trembled a little, and Gerald, noticing this, murmured again, turning away his eyes: 'Forgive me. Please understand. I must know what I've done.'

'You see,' said Franklin, after a further silence, while he continued to transfer the pamphlets; 'quite apart from my own feelings—which do, I suppose, make it a difficult question to answer—I really don't know how to answer, because what I feel is that the answer depends on you. I mean,' said Franklin, glancing up, 'do you love her most, or do I? And even beyond that—because, of course, the man who loved her least might make her happiest if she loved him—have you got it in you to give her life? Have you got it in you to give her something beyond yourself to live for? Helen doesn't love me, she never could have loved me, and I believe, with you, that she loves you; but even so it's quite possible that in the long-run I might have made her happier than you can, unless you have—in yourself—more to make her happy with.'

Gerald gazed at Franklin, and Franklin gazed back at him. In Gerald's face a flush slowly mounted, a vivid flush, sensitive and suffering as a young girl's. And as if Franklin had borne a mild but effulgent light into the innermost chambers of his heart, and made self-contemplation for the first time in his life, perhaps, real to him, he said in a gentle voice: 'I'm afraid you're making me hopeless. I'm afraid I've nothing to give Helen—beyond myself. I'm a worthless fellow, really, you know. I've never made anything of myself or taken anything seriously at all. So how can Helen take me seriously? Yes, I see it, and I've robbed her of everything. Only,' said Gerald, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and his forehead on his hands, while he tried to think it out, 'it is serious, now, you know. It's really serious at last. I would try to give her something beyond myself and to make things worth while for her—I see what you mean; but I don't believe I shall ever be able to make her believe it now.'

They sat thus for a long time in silence—Gerald with his head leant on his hands, Franklin looking at him quietly and thoughtfully. And as a result of long reflection, he said at last: 'If she loves you still, you won't have to try to make her believe it. I'd like to believe it, and so would you; but if Helen loves you, she'll take you for yourself, of course. The question is, does she love you? Does she love you enough, I mean, to want to mend and grow again? Perhaps it's that way you've wrecked her; perhaps it's withered her—going on for all these years caring, while you didn't see and want.'

From behind his hands Gerald made a vague sound of acquiescent distress. 'What shall I do?' he then articulated. 'She won't see me. She says she won't see me until I can meet her as if I'd forgotten. It isn't with Helen the sort of thing it would mean with most women. She's not saving her dignity by threats and punishments she won't hold to. Helen always means what she says—horribly.'

Franklin contemplated the bent head. Gerald's thick hair, disordered by the long, fine fingers that ran up into it; Gerald's attitude sitting there, miserable, yet not undignified, helpless, yet not humble; Gerald's whole personality, its unused strength, its secure sweetness, affected him strangely. He didn't feel near Gerald as he had, in a sense, felt near Helen. They were aliens, and would remain so; but he felt tenderly towards him. And, even while it inflicted a steady, probing wound to recognise it, he recognised, profoundly, sadly, and finally, that Gerald and Helen did belong to each other, by an affinity deeper than moral standards and immeasurable by the test of happiness. Helen had been right to love him all her life. He felt as if he, from his distance, loved him, for himself, and because he was loveable. And he wanted Helen to take Gerald. He was sure, now, that he wanted it.

'See here,' he said, in his voice of mild, fraternal deliberation, 'I don't know whether it will do much good, but we'll try it. Helen has a very real feeling for me, you know; Helen likes me and thinks of me as a true friend. I'm certainly not satisfactory to her,' and Franklin smiled a little; 'but all the same she's very fond of me; she'd do a lot to please me; I'm sure of it. So how would it be if I wrote to her and put things to her, you know?'

Gerald raised his head and looked over the table across the piled pamphlets at Franklin. For a long time he looked at him, and presently Franklin saw that tears had mounted to his eyes. The emotion that he felt to be so unusual, communicated itself to him. He really hadn't known till he saw Gerald Digby's eyes fill with tears what his own emotion was. It surged up in him suddenly, blotting out Gerald's face, overpowering the long resistance of his trained control; and it was with an intolerable sense of loss and desolation that, knowing that he loved Gerald and that Gerald's tears were a warrant for his loveableness and for the workings of fate against himself, he put his head down on his arms and, not sobbing, not weeping, yet overcome, he let the waves of his sorrow meet over him.

He did not know, then, what he thought or felt. All that he was conscious of was the terrible submerging of will and thought and the engulfing sense of desolation; and all that he seemed to hear was the sound of his own heart beating the one lovely and agonising word: 'Helen—Helen—Helen!'

He was aware at last, dimly, that Gerald had moved, had come round the table, and was leaning on it beside him. Then Gerald put his hand on Franklin's hand. The touch drew him up out of his depths. He raised his head, keeping his face hidden, and he clasped Gerald's hand for a moment. Then Gerald said brokenly: 'You mustn't write. You mustn't do anything for me. You must let me take my own chances—and if I've none left, it will be what I deserve.'

These words, like air breathed in after long suffocation under water, cleared Franklin's mind. He shook his head, and he found Gerald's hand again while he said, able now, as the light grew upon him, to think:

'I want to write. I want you to have all the chances you can.'

'I don't deserve them,' said Gerald.

'I don't know about that,' said Franklin, 'I don't know about that at all. And besides'—and now he found something of his old whimsicality to help his final argument—'let's say, if you'd rather, that Helen deserves them. Let's say that it's for Helen's sake that I want you to have every chance.'



CHAPTER XXXII.

Helen received Franklin's letter by the first post next morning. She read it in bed, where she had remained ever since parting from him, lying there with closed eyes in the drowsy apathy that had fallen upon her.

'DEAR HELEN,'—Franklin wrote, and something in the writing pained her even before she read the words—'Gerald Digby has been with me here. Your aunt has been telling him things. He knows that I care for you and what it all meant yesterday. It has been a very painful experience for him, as you may imagine, and the way he took it made me like him very much. It's because of that that I'm writing to you now. The thing that tormented me most was the idea that, perhaps, with all my deficiencies, I could give you more than he could. I hadn't a very high opinion of him, you know. I felt you might be safer with me. But now, from what I've seen, I'm sure that he is the man for you. I understand how you could have loved him for all your life. He's not as big as you are, nor as strong; he hasn't your character; but you'll make him grow—and no one else can, for he loves you with his whole heart, and he's a broken man.

'Dear Helen, I know what it feels like now. You're withered and burnt out. It's lasted too long to be felt any longer and you believe it's dead. But it isn't dead, Helen; I'm sure it isn't. Things like that don't die unless something else comes and takes their place. It's withered, but it will grow again. See him; be kind to him, and you'll find out. And even if you can't find out yet, even if you think it's all over, look at it this way. You know our talk about marriage and how you were willing to marry me, not loving me; well, look at it this way, for his sake, and for mine. He needs you more than anything; he'll be nothing, or less and less, without you; with you he'll be more and more. Think of his life. You've got responsibility for that, Helen; you've let him depend on you always—and you've got responsibility, too, for what's happened now. You told him—I'm not blaming you—I understand—I think you were right; but you changed things for him and made him see what he hadn't seen before; nothing can ever be the same for him again; you mustn't forget that; your friendship is spoiled for him, after what you've done. So at the very least you can feel sorry for him and feel like a mother to him, and marry him for that—as lots of women do.

'Now I'm going to be very egotistical, but you'll know why. Think of my life, dear Helen. We won't hide from what we know. We know that I love you and that to give you up—even if, in a way, I had to—was the greatest sacrifice of my life. Now, what I put to you is this: Is it going to be for nothing—I mean for nothing where you are concerned? If I'm to think of you going on alone with your heart getting harder and drier every year, and everything tender and trustful dying out of you—I don't see how I can bear it.

'So what I ask you is to try to be happy; what I ask you is to try to make him happy; just look at it like that; try to make him happy and to help him to grow to be a fine, big person, and then you'll find out that you are growing, too, in all sorts of ways you never dreamed of.

'When you get this, write to him and tell him that he may come. And when he is with you, be kind to him. Oh—my dear Helen—I do beg it of you. Put it like this—be kind to me and try.—Your affectionate

FRANKLIN.'

When Helen had read this letter she did not weep, but she felt as if some hurt, almost deeper than she could endure, was being inflicted on her. It had begun with the first sight of Franklin's letter; the writing of it had looked like hard, steady breathing over some heart-arresting pain. Franklin's suffering flowed into her from every gentle, careful sentence; and to Helen, so unaware, till now, of any one's suffering but her own, this sharing of Franklin's was an experience new and overpowering. No tears came, while she held the letter and looked before her intently, and it was not as if her heart softened; but it seemed to widen, as if some greatness, irresistible and grave, forced a way into it. It widened to Franklin, to the thought of Franklin and to Franklin's suffering; its sorrow and its compassion were for Franklin; and as it received and enshrined him, it shut Gerald out. There was no room for Gerald in her heart.

She would do part of what Franklin asked of her, of course. She would see Gerald; she would be kind to him; she would even try to feel for him. But the effort was easy because she was so sure that it would be fruitless. For Gerald, she was withered and burnt out. If she were to 'grow'—dear, funny phrases, even in her extremity, Helen could smile over them; even though she loved dear Franklin and enshrined him, his phrases would always seem funny to her—but if she were to grow it must be for Franklin, and in a different way from what he asked. She would indeed try not to become harder and drier; she would try to make of her life something not too alien from his ideal for her; she would try to pursue the just and the beautiful. But to rekindle the burnt-out fires of her love was a miracle that even Franklin's love and Franklin's suffering could not perform, and as for marrying Gerald in order to be a mother to him, she did not feel it possible, even for Franklin's sake, to assume that travesty.

It was at five o'clock that she asked Gerald to come and see her. She went down to him in her sitting-room, when, on the stroke of the clock, he was announced. She felt that it required no effort to meet him, beyond the forcing of her weariness.

Gerald was standing before the fire, and in looking at him, as she entered and closed the door, she was aware of a little sense of surprise. She had not expected to find him, since the crash of Aunt Grizel's revelations, as fatuous as the day before yesterday; nor had she expected the boyish sulkiness of that day's earlier mood. She expected change and the signs of discomfort and distress. It was this haggard brightness for which she was unprepared. He looked as if he hadn't slept or eaten, and under jaded eyelids his eyes had the sparkling fever of insomnia.

Helen felt that she could thoroughly carry out the first of Franklin's requests; she could be kind and she could be sorry; yes, Gerald was very unhappy; it was strange to think of, and pitiful.

'Have you had any tea?' she asked him, giving him her hand, which he pressed mechanically.

'No, thanks,' said Gerald.

'Do have some. You look hungry.'

'I'm not hungry, thanks.' He was neither hostile nor pleading; he only kept his eyes fixed on her with bright watchfulness, rather as a patient's eyes watch the doctor who is to pronounce a verdict, and Helen, with all her kindness, felt a little irked and ill at ease before his gaze.

'You've heard from Kane?' Gerald said, after a pause. Helen had taken her usual place in the low chair.

'Yes, this morning.'

'And that's why you sent for me?'

'Yes,' said Helen, 'he asked me to.'

Gerald looked down into the fire. 'I can't tell you what I think of him. You can't care to hear, of course. You know what I've done to him, and that must make you feel that I'm not the person to talk about him. But I've never met any one so good.'

'He is good. I'm glad to hear you say it. He is the best person I've ever met, too,' said Helen. 'As for what you did to him, you didn't know what you were doing.'

'I don't think that stupidity is any excuse. I ought to have felt he couldn't be near you like that, and not love you. I robbed him of you, didn't I? If it hadn't been for what I did, you would have married him, all the same—in spite of what you told me, I mean.'

Helen had coloured a little, and after a pause in which she thought over his words she said: 'Yes, of course I would have married him all the same. But it was really I, in what I told you, who brought it upon myself and upon Franklin.'

For a little while there was silence and then Gerald said, delicately, yet with a directness that showed he took for granted in her a detached candour equal to his own: 'I think I asked it stupidly. I suppose the thing I can't even yet realise is that, in a way, I robbed you too. I've robbed you of everything, haven't I, Helen?'

'Not of everything,' said Helen, glad really of the small consolation she could offer him. 'Not of financial safety, as it happens. It will make you less unhappy to hear, so I must tell you, Franklin is arranging things with Aunt Grizel so that when she dies I shall come into quite a nice little bit of money. I shall have no more sordid worries. In that way you mustn't have me on your conscience.'

Gerald's eyes were on her and they took in this fact of her safety with no commotion; it was but one—and a lesser—among the many strange facts he had had to take in. And he forced himself to look squarely at what he had conceived to be the final impossibility as he asked: 'And—in other ways?—Could you have fallen in love with him, Helen?'

It was so bad, so inconceivably bad a thing to face, that his relief was like a joy when Helen answered. 'No, I could never have fallen in love with dear Franklin. But I cared for him very much, the more, no doubt, from having ceased to care about love. I felt that he was the best person, the truest, the dearest, I had ever known, and that we would make a success of our life together.'

'Yes, yes, of course,' Gerald hastened past her qualifications to the one liberating fact. 'Two people like you would have had to. But you didn't love him; you couldn't have come to love him. I haven't robbed you of a man you could have loved.'

She saw his immense relief. The joy of it was in his eyes and voice; and the thought of Franklin, of what she had not been able to do for Franklin, made it bitter to her that because she had not been able to save Franklin, Gerald should find relief.

'You couldn't have robbed me of him if there'd been any chance of that,' she said. 'If there had been any chance of my loving Franklin I would never have let him go. Don't be glad, don't show me that you are glad—because I didn't love him.'

'I can't help being glad, Helen,' he said.

She leaned her head on her hand, covering her eyes. While he was there, showing her that he was glad because she had not loved Franklin, she could not be kind, nor even just to him.

'Helen,' he said, 'I know what you are feeling; but will you listen to me?' She answered that she would listen to anything he had to say, and her voice had the leaden tone of impersonal charity.

'Helen,' Gerald said, 'I know how I've blundered. I see everything. But, with it all, seeing it all, I don't think that you are fair to me. I don't think it is fair if you can't see that I couldn't have thought of all these other possibilities—after what you'd told me—the other day. How could I think of anything, then, but the one thing—that you loved me and that I loved you, and that, of course, I must set my mistake right at once, set Althea free and come to you? I was very simple and very stupid; but I don't think it's fair not to see that I couldn't believe you'd really repulse me, finally, if you loved me.'

'You ought to have believed it,' Helen said, still with her covered eyes. 'That is what is most simple, most stupid in you. You ought to have felt—and you ought to feel now—that to a woman who could tell you what I did, everything is over.'

'But, Helen, that's my point,' ever so carefully and patiently he insisted. 'How can it be over when I love you—if you still love me?'

She put down her hand now and looked up at him and she saw his hope; not yet dead; sick, wounded, perplexed, but, in his care and patience, vigilant. And it was with a sad wonder for the truth of her own words, that she said, looking up at the face dear beyond all telling for so many years, 'I don't want you, Gerald. I don't want your love. I'm not blaming you. I am fair to you. I see that you couldn't help it, and that it was my fault really. But you are asking for something that isn't there any longer.'

'You mean,' said Gerald, he was very pale, 'that I've won no rights; you don't want a man who has won no rights.'

'There are no rights to win, Gerald.'

'Because of what I've done to him?'

'Perhaps; but I don't think it's that.'

'Because of what I've done to you—not seeing—all our lives?'

'Perhaps, Gerald. I don't know. I can't tell you, for I don't know myself. I don't think anything has been killed. I think something is dead that's been dying by inches for years. Don't press me any more. Accept the truth. It's all over. I don't want you any longer.'

Helen had risen while she spoke and kept her eyes on Gerald's in speaking. Until this moment, for all his pain and perplexity, he had not lost hope. He had been amazed and helpless and full of fear, but he had not believed, not really believed, that she was lost to him. Now, she saw it in his eyes, he did believe; and as the patient, hearing his sentence, gazes dumb and stricken, facing death, so he gazed at her, seeing irrevocability in her unmoved face. And, accepting his doom, sheer childishness overcame him. As Franklin the day before had felt, so he now felt, the intolerableness of his woe; and, as with Franklin, the waves closed over his head. Helen was so near him that it was but a stumbling step that brought her within his arms; but it was not with the lover's supplication that he clung to her; he clung, hiding his face on her breast, like a child to its mother, broken-hearted, bewildered, reproachful. And, bursting into tears, he sobbed: 'How cruel you are! how cruel! It is your pride—you've the heart of a stone! If I'd loved you for years and told you and made you know you loved me back—could I have treated you like this—and cast you off—and stopped loving you, because you'd never seen before? O Helen, how can you—how can you!'

After a moment Helen spoke, angrily, because she was astounded, and because, for the first time in her life, she was frightened, beyond her depth, helpless in the waves of emotion that lifted her like great encompassing billows. 'Gerald, don't. Gerald, it is absurd of you. Gerald, don't cry.' She had never seen him cry.

He heard her dimly, and the words were the cruel ones he expected. The sense of her cruelty filled him, and the dividing sense that she, who was so cruel, was still his only refuge, his only consolation.

'What have I done, I'd like to know, that you should treat me like this? If you loved me before—all those years—why should you stop now, because I love you? why should you stop because of telling me?'

Again Helen's voice came to him after a pause, and it seemed now to grope, stupefied and uncertain, for answers to his absurdity. 'How can one argue, Gerald, like this; perhaps it was because I told you? Perhaps——'

He took her up, not waiting to hear her surmises. 'How can one get over a thing like that, all in a moment? How can it die like that? You're not over it, not really. It is all pride, and you are punishing me for what I couldn't help, and punishing yourself too, for no one will ever love you as I do. O Helen—I can't believe it's dead. Don't you know that no one will ever love you as I do? Can't you see how happy we could have been together? It's so silly of you not to see. Yes, you are silly as well as cruel.' He shook her while he held her, while he buried his face and cried—cried, literally, like a baby.

She stood still, enfolded but not enfolding, and now she said nothing for a long time, while her eyes, with their strained look of pain, gazed widely, and as if in astonishment, before her; and he, knowing only the silence, the unresponsive silence, continued to sob his protestation, his reproach, with a helplessness and vehemence ridiculous and heart-rending.

Then, slowly, as if compelled, Helen put her arms around him, and, dully, like a creature hypnotised to action strange to its whole nature, she said once more, and in a different voice: 'Don't cry, Gerald.' But she, too, was crying. She tried to control her sobs; but they broke from her, strange and difficult, like the sobs of the hypnotised creature waking from its trance to confused and painful consciousness, and, resting her forehead on his shoulder, she repeated dully, between her sobs: 'Don't cry.'

He was not crying any longer. Her weeping had stilled his in an instant, and she went on, between her broken breaths: 'How absurd—oh, how absurd. Sit down here—yes—keep your head so, if you must, you foolish, foolish child.'

He held her, hearing her sobs, feeling them lift her breast, and, in all his great astonishment, like a smile, the memory of the other day stole over him, the stillness, the accomplishment, the blissful peace, the lifting to a serene eternity of space. To remember it now was like seeing the sky from a nest, and in the sweet darkness of sudden security he murmured: 'You are the foolish child.'

'How can I believe you love me?' said Helen.

'How can you not?'

They sat side by side, her arms around him and his head upon her breast. 'It was only because I told you——'

'Well—isn't that reason enough?'

'How can it be reason enough for me?'

'How can it not? You've spent your whole life hiding from me; when I saw you, why, of course, I fell in love at once. O Helen—dear, dear Helen!'

'When you saw my love.'

'Wasn't that seeing you?'

They spoke in whispers, and their hearts were not in their words. He raised his head and looked at her, and he smiled at her now with the smile of the beautiful necessity. 'How you've frightened me,' he said. 'Don't be proud. Even if it did need your cleverness to show me that, too. I mean—you've given me everything—always—and why shouldn't you have given me the chance to see you—and to know what you are to me? How you frightened me. You are not proud any longer. You love me.'

She was not proud any longer. She loved him. Vaguely, in the bewilderment of her strange, her blissful humility, among the great billows of life that encompassed and lifted her, it seemed with enormous heart-beats, Helen remembered Franklin's words. 'Let it melt—please let it melt, dear Helen.' But it had needed the inarticulate, the instinctive, to pierce to the depths of life. Gerald's tears, his head so boyishly pressed against her, his arms so childishly clinging, had told her what her heart might have been dead to for ever if, with reason and self-command, he had tried to put it into words.

She looked at him, through her tears, and she knew him dearer to her in this resurrection than if her heart had never died to him; and, as he smiled at her, she, too, smiled back, tremblingly.



CHAPTER XXXIII.

Althea had not seen Gerald after the day that they came up from Merriston together. The breaking of their engagement was duly announced, and, with his little note to her, thanking her for her frankness and wishing her every happiness, Gerald and all things connected with him seemed to pass out of her life. She saw no more of the frivolous relations who were really serious, nor of the serious ones who were really frivolous. She did not even see Helen. Helen's engagement to Franklin had never been formally announced, and few, beyond her circle of nearest friends, knew of it; the fact that Franklin had now returned to his first love was not one that could, at the moment, be made appropriately public. But, of course, Helen had had to be told, not only that Franklin had gone from her, but that he had come back to Althea, and Althea wondered deeply how this news had been imparted. She had not felt strength to impart it herself. When she asked Franklin, very tentatively, about it, he said: 'That's all right, dear. I've explained. Helen perfectly understands.'

That it was all right seemed demonstrated by the little note, kind and sympathetic, that Helen wrote to her, saying that she did understand, perfectly, and was so glad for her and for Franklin, and that it was such a good thing when people found out mistakes in time. There was not a trace of grievance; Helen seemed to relinquish a good which, she recognised, had only been hers because Althea hadn't wanted it. And this was natural; how could one show one's grievance in such a case? Helen, above all, would never show it; and Althea was at once oppressed, and at the same time oddly sustained by the thought that she had, all inevitably, done her friend an injury. She lay awake at night, turning over in her mind Helen's present plight and framing loving plans for the future. She took refuge in such plans from a sense of having come to an end of things. To think of Helen, and of what, with their wealth, she and Franklin could do for Helen, seemed, really, her strongest hold on life. It was the brightest thing that she had to look forward to, and she looked forward to it with complete self-effacement. She saw the beautiful Italian villa where Helen should be the fitting centre, the English house where Helen, rather than she, should entertain. She felt that she asked nothing more for herself. She was safe, if one liked to put it so, and in that safety she felt not only her ambitions, but even any personal desires, extinguished. Her desire, now, was to unite with Franklin in making the proper background for Helen. But at the moment these projects were unrealisable; taste, as well as circumstance, required a pause, a lull. It was a relief—so many things were a relief, so few things more than merely that—to know that Helen was in the country somewhere, and would not be back for ten days or a fortnight.

Meanwhile, Miss Harriet Robinson, very grave but very staunch, sustained Althea through all the outward difficulties of her volte-face. Miss Robinson, of course, had had to be told of the reason for the volte-face, the fact that Althea had found, after all, that she cared more for Franklin Winslow Kane. It was in regard to the breaking of her engagement that Miss Robinson was staunch and grave; in regard to the new engagement, Althea saw that, though still staunch, she was much disturbed. Miss Robinson found Franklin hard to place, and found it hard to understand why Althea had turned from Gerald Digby to him. Franklin's millions didn't count for much with Miss Robinson, nor could she suspect them of counting for anything, where marriage was concerned, with her friend. She had not, indeed, a high opinion of the millionaire type of her compatriots. Her standards were birth and fashion, and poor Franklin could not be said to embody either of these claims. His mitigating qualities could hardly shine for Miss Robinson, who, accustomed to continually seeing and frequently evading the drab, dry, utilitarian species of her country-people, could not be expected to find in him the flavour of oddity and significance that his English acquaintance prized. Franklin didn't make any effort to place himself more favourably. He was very gentle and very attentive, and he followed all Althea's directions as to clothes and behaviour with careful literalness; but even barbered and tailored by the best that London had to offer, he seemed to sink inevitably into the discreetly effaced position that the American husband so often assumes behind his more brilliant mate, and Althea might have been more aware of this had she not been so sunken in an encompassing consciousness of her own obliteration. She felt herself nearer Franklin there, and the sense of relief and safety came most to her when she could feel herself near Franklin. It didn't disturb her, standing by him in the background, that Miss Robinson should not appreciate him. After all, deeper than anything, was the knowledge that Helen had appreciated him. Recede as far as he would from the gross foreground places, Helen's choice of him, Helen's love—for after a fashion, Helen must have loved him—gave him a final and unquestionable value. It was in this assurance of Helen's choice that she found a refuge when questionings and wonders came to drag her down to suffering again. There were many things that menaced the lull of safety, things she could not bear yet to look at. The sense of her own abandonment to weak and disingenuous impulses was one; another shadowed her unstable peace more darkly. Had Helen really minded losing Franklin—apart from his money? What had his value really been to her? What was she feeling and doing now? What was Gerald doing and feeling, and what did they both think or suspect of her? The answer to some of these questionings came to her from an unsuspected quarter. It was on a morning of chill mists and pale sunlight that Althea, free of Miss Robinson, walked down Grosvenor Street towards the park. She liked to go into the park on such mornings, when Miss Robinson left her free, and sit on a bench and abandon herself to remote, impersonal dreams. It was just as she entered Berkeley Square that she met Mrs. Mallison, that aunt of Gerald's who had struck her, some weeks ago, as so disconcerting, with her skilfully preserved prettiness and her ethical and metaphysical aspirations. This lady, furred to her ears, was taking out two small black pomeranians for an airing. She wore long pearl ear-rings, and her narrow, melancholy face was delicately rouged and powdered. Althea's colour rose painfully; she had seen none of Gerald's relatives since the severance. Mrs. Mallison, however, showed no embarrassment. She stopped at once and took Althea's hand and gazed tenderly upon her. Her manner had always afflicted Althea, with its intimations of some deep, mystical understanding.

'My dear, I'm so glad—to meet you, you know. How nice, how right you've been.' Mrs. Mallison murmured her words rather than spoke them and could pronounce none of her r's. 'I'm so glad to be able to tell you so. You're walking? Come with me, then; I'm just taking the dogs round the square. Do you love dogs too? I am sure you must. You have the eyes of the dog-lover. I don't know how I could live without mine; they understand when no one else does. I didn't write, because I think letters are such soulless things, don't you? They are the tombs of the spirit—little tombs for failed things—too often. I've thought of you, and felt for you—so much; but I couldn't write. And now I must tell you that I agree with you with all my heart. Love's the only thing in life, isn't it?' Mrs. Mallison smiled, pressing Althea's arm affectionately. Althea remembered to have heard that Mrs. Mallison had made a most determined mariage de convenance and had sought love in other directions; but, summoning what good grace she could, she answered that she, too, considered love the only thing.

'You didn't love him enough, and you found it out in time, and you told him. How brave; how right. And then—am I too indiscreet? but I know you feel we are friends—you found you loved some one else; the reality came and showed you the unreality. That enchanting Mr. Kane—oh, I felt it the moment I looked at him—there was an affinity between us, our souls understood each other. And so deliciously rich you'll be, not that money makes any difference, does it? but it is nice to be able to do things for the people one loves.'

Althea struggled in a maze of discomfort. Behind Mrs. Mallison's caressing intonations was something that perplexed her. What did Mrs. Mallison know, and what did she guess? She was aware, evidently, of her own engagement to Franklin and, no doubt, of Franklin's engagement to Helen and its breaking off. What did she know about the cause of that breaking off? Her troubled cogitations got no further, for Mrs. Mallison went on:

'And how happily it has all turned out—all round—hasn't it? How horrid for you and Mr. Kane, if it hadn't; not that you'd have had anything to reproach yourselves with—really—I know—because love is the only thing; but if Helen and Gerald had just been left plantes la, it would have been harder, wouldn't it? I've been staying with them at the same house in the country and it's quite obvious what's happened. You knew from the first, no doubt; but of course they are saying nothing, just as you and Mr. Kane are saying nothing. They didn't tell me, but I guessed at once. And the first thing I thought was: Oh—how happy—how perfect this makes it for Miss Jakes and Mr. Kane. They've all found out in time.'

Althea grew cold. She commanded her voice. 'Helen? Gerald?' she said. 'Haven't you mistaken? They've always been the nearest friends.'

'Oh no—no,' smiled Mrs. Mallison, with even greater brightness and gentleness, 'I never mistake these things; an affair of the heart is the one thing that I always see. Helen, perhaps, could hide it from me; she is a woman and can hide things—Helen is cold too—I am never very sure of Helen's heart—of course I love her dearly, every one must who knows her; but she is cold, unawakened, the type that holds out the cheek, not the type that kisses. I confess that I love most the reckless, loving type; and I believe that you and I are unlike Helen there—we kiss, we don't hold out the cheek. But, no, I never would have guessed from Helen. It was Gerald who gave them both away. Poor, dear Gerald, never have I beheld such a transfigured being—he is radiantly in love, quite radiantly; it's too pretty to see him.'

The vision of Gerald, radiantly in love, flashed horridly for Althea. It was dim, yet bright, scintillating darkly; she could only imagine it in similes; she had never seen anything that could visualise it for her. The insufferable dogs, like tethered bubbles, bounded before them, constantly impeding their progress. Althea was thankful for the excuse afforded her by the tangling of her feet in the string to pause and stoop; she felt that her rigid face must betray her. She stooped for a long moment and hoped that her flush would cover her rigidity. It was when she raised herself that she saw suddenly in Mrs. Mallison's face something that gave her more than a suspicion. She didn't suspect her of cruelty or vulgar vengeance—Gerald's aunt was quite without rancour on the score of her jilting of him; but she did suspect, and more than suspect her—it was like the unendurable probing of a wound to feel it—of idle yet implacable curiosity, and of a curiosity edged, perhaps, with idle malice. She summoned all her strength. She smiled and shook her head a little. 'Faithless Gerald! So soon,' she said. 'He is consoled quickly. No, I never guessed anything at all.'

Mrs. Mallison had again passed her arm through hers and again pressed it. 'It is soon, isn't it? A sort of chasse-croise. But how strange and fortunate that it should be soon—I know you feel that too.'

'Oh yes, of course, I feel it; it is an immense relief. But they ought to have told me,' Althea smiled.

'I wonder at that too,' said Mrs. Mallison. 'It is rather bad of them, I think, when they must know what it would mean to you of joy. When did it happen, do you suppose?'

Althea wondered. Wonders were devouring her.

'It happened with you quite suddenly, didn't it?' said Mrs. Mallison, who breathed the soft fragrance of her solicitude into Althea's face as she leaned her head near and pressed her arm closely.

'Quite suddenly,' Althea replied, 'that is, with me it was sudden. Franklin, of course, has loved me for a great many years.'

'So he was faithless too, for his little time?'

Althea's brain whirled. 'Faithless? Franklin?'

'I mean, while he made his mistake—while he thought he was in love with Helen.'

'It wasn't a question of that. It was to be a match of reason, and friendship—everybody knew,' Althea stammered.

'Was it?' said Mrs. Mallison with deep interest. 'I see, like yours and Gerald's.'

'Oh——' Althea was not able in her headlong course to do more than glance at the implications that whizzed past. 'Gerald and I made the mistake, I think; we believed ourselves in love.'

'Did you?' Mrs. Mallison repeated her tone of affectionate and brooding interest. 'What a strange thing the human heart is, isn't it?'

'Very, very strange.'

'How dear and frank of you to see it all as you do. And there are no more mistakes now,' said Mrs. Mallison. 'No one is reasonable and every one is radiant.'

'Every one is radiant and reasonable too, I hope,' said Althea. Her head still whirled as she heard herself analysing for Mrs. Mallison's correction these sanctities of her life. Odious, intolerable, insolent woman! She could have burst into tears as she walked beside her, held by her, while her hateful dogs, shrilly barking, bounded buoyantly around them.

'It's dear of you too, to tell me all about it,' said Mrs. Mallison. 'Have you seen Helen yet? She is just back.'

'No, I've not seen her.'

'You will meet? I am sure you will still be friends—two such real people as you are.'

'Of course we shall meet. Helen is one of my dearest friends.'

'I see. It is so beautiful when people can rise above things. You make me very happy. Don't tell Helen what I've told you,' Mrs. Mallison with gentle gaiety warned her. 'I knew—in case you hadn't heard—that it would relieve you so intensely to hear that she and Gerald were happy, in spite of what you had to do to them. But it would make Helen cross with me if she knew I'd told you when she hadn't. I'm rather afraid of Helen, aren't you? I'm sure she'll give Gerald dreadful scoldings sometimes. Poor, dear Gerald!' Mrs. Mallison laughed reminiscently. 'Never have I beheld such a transfigured being. I didn't think he had it in him to be in love to such an extent. Oh, it was all in his face—his eyes—when he looked at her.'

Yes, malicious, malicious to the point of vulgarity; that was Althea's thought as, like an arrow released from long tension, she sped away, the turn of the square once made and Mrs. Mallison and her dogs once more received into the small house in an adjacent street. Tears were in Althea's eyes, hot tears, of fury, of humiliation, and—oh, it flooded over her—of bitterest sorrow and yearning. Gerald, radiant Gerald—lost to her for ever; not even lost; never possessed. And into the sorrow and humiliation, poisonous suspicions crept. When did it happen? Where was she? What had been done to her? She must see; she must know. She hailed a hansom and was driven to old Miss Buchanan's house in Belgravia.



CHAPTER XXXIV.

Helen was sitting at her writing-table before the window, and the morning light fell on her gracefully disordered hair and gracefully shabby shoulders. The aspect of her back struck on Althea's bitter, breathless mood. There was no effort made for anything with Helen. She was the sort of person who would get things without seeking for them and be things without caring to be them. She had taken what she wanted, when she wanted it; first Franklin, and then—and perhaps it had been before Franklin had failed her, perhaps it had been before she, Althea, had failed Gerald—she had taken Gerald. Althea's mind, reeling, yet strangely lucid after the shock of the last great injury, was also aware, in the moment of her entrance, of many other injuries, old ones, small ones, yet, in their summing up—and everything seemed to be summed up now in the cruel revelation—as intolerable as the new and great one. More strongly than ever before she was aware that Helen was hard, that there was nothing in her soft or tentative or afraid; and the realisation, though it was not new, came with an added bitterness this morning. It did not weaken her, however; on the contrary, it nerved her to self-protection. If Helen was hard, she would not, to-day, show herself soft. It was she who must assume the air of success, and of rueful yet helpless possessorship. These impressions and resolutions occupied but an instant. Helen rose and came to her, and what Althea saw in her face armed her resolutions with hostility. Helen's face confirmed what Mrs. Mallison had said. It was not resentful, not ironically calm. A solicitous interest, even a sort of benignity, was in her bright gaze. Helen was hard; she did not really care at all; but she was kind, kinder than ever before; and Althea found this kindness intolerable.

'Dear Helen,' she said, 'I'm so glad to see you. I had to come at once when I heard that you were back. You don't mind seeing me?'

'Not a bit,' said Helen, who had taken her hand. 'Why should I?'

'I was afraid that perhaps you might not want to—for a long time.'

'We aren't so foolish as that,' said Helen smiling.

'No, that is what I hoped you would feel too. We have been in the hands of fate, haven't we, Helen? I've seemed weak and disloyal, I know—to you and to Gerald; but I think it was only seeming. When I found out my mistake I couldn't go on. And then the rest all followed—inevitably.'

Helen had continued to hold her hand while she spoke, and she continued to gaze at her for another moment before, pressing it, she let it fall and said: 'Of course you couldn't go on.'

Helen was as resolved—Althea saw that clearly—to act her part of unresentful kindness as she to act hers of innocent remorse. And the swordthrust in the sight was to suspect that had Helen been in reality the dispossessed and not the secretly triumphant, she might have been as kind and as unresentful.

'It's all been a dreadful mistake,' Althea said, going to a chair and loosening her furs. 'From the very beginning I felt doubt. From the very beginning I felt that Gerald and I did not really make each other happy. And I believe that you wondered about it too.'

Helen had resumed her seat at the writing-table, sitting turned from it, her hand hanging over the back of the chair, her long legs crossed, and she faced her friend with that bright yet softened gaze, interested, alert, but too benign, too contented, to search or question closely. She was evidently quite willing that Althea should think what she chose, and, this was becoming evident, she intended to help her to think it. So after a little pause she answered, 'I did wonder, rather; it didn't seem to me that you and Gerald were really suited.'

'And you felt, didn't you,' Althea urged, 'that it was only because I had been so blind, and had not seen where my heart really was, you know, that your engagement was possible? I was so afraid you'd think we'd been faithless to you—Franklin and I; but, when I stopped being blind——'

'Of course,' Helen helped her on, nodding and smiling gravely, 'of course you took him back. I don't think you were either of you faithless, and you mustn't have me a bit on your minds; it was startling, of course; but I'm not heart-broken,' Helen assured her.

Oh, there was no malice here; it was something far worse to bear, this wish to lift every shadow and smooth every path. Althea's eyes fixed themselves hard on her friend. Her head swam a little and some of her sustaining lucidity left her.

'I was so afraid,' she said, 'that you, perhaps, cared for Franklin—had come to care so much, I mean—that it might have been hard for you to forgive. I can't tell you the relief it is——'

'To see that I didn't care so much as that?' Helen smiled brightly, though with a brightness, now, slightly wary, as though with all her efforts to slide and not to press, she felt the ice cracking a little under her feet, and as though some care might be necessary if she were to skate safely away. 'Don't have that in the least on your mind, it was what you always disapproved of, you know, an arrangement of convenience. Franklin and I both understood perfectly. You know how mercenary I am—though I told you, I remember, that I couldn't think of marrying anybody I didn't like. I liked Franklin, more than I can say; but it was never a question of love.'

In Althea's ears, also, the ice seemed now to crack ominously. 'You mean,' she said, 'that you wouldn't have thought of marrying Franklin if it hadn't been for his money?'

There was nothing for Helen but to skate straight ahead. 'No, I don't suppose I should.'

'But you had become the greatest friends.'

She was aware that she must seem to be trying, strangely, incredibly, to prove to Helen that she had been in love with Franklin; to prove to her that she had no right not to resent anything; no right to find forgiveness so easy. But there was no time now to stop.

'Of course we became the greatest friends,' Helen said, and it was as if with relief for the outlet. She was bewildered, and did not know where they were going. 'I don't need to tell you what I think of Franklin. He is the dearest and best of men, and you are the luckiest of women to have won him.'

'Ah,' uncontrollably Althea rose to her feet with almost the cry, 'I see; you think me lucky to have won a man who, in himself, without money, wasn't good enough for you. Thank you.'