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.