“‘Yet I must eat,’ she said, lifting her eyes to mine in a sort of patient despair, which yet was without accusation.
“But my hand had instinctively gone to hers and grasped it.
“‘Why must you eat it?’ I asked. ‘If—if you do not find it wholesome, why do you touch it?’
“‘Because my step-mother expects me to,’ she cried, ‘and I have no other will than hers. When I was a little, little child, my father made me promise that if I ever came to live with her I would obey her simplest wish. And I always have. I will not disappoint the trust he put in me.’
“‘Even if you die of it?’
“I do not know whether I whispered these words or only thought them. She answered as though I had spoken.
“‘I am not afraid to die. I am more afraid to live. She may ask me some day to do something I feel to be wrong.’
“When I fled down the hall that night, I heard one of the small clocks speak to me. Tell! it cried, tell! tell! tell! tell! I rushed away from it with beaded forehead and rising hair.
“Then another’s note piped up. No it droned. No! no! no! no! I stopped and took heart. Disgrace the woman I loved, on the brink of the grave? I—, who asked no other boon from heaven than to see her happy, gracious, and good? Impossible. I would obey the great clock’s voice; the others were mere chatterboxes.
“But it has at last changed its tune, for some reason, quite changed its tune. Now, it is Yes! Yes! instead of No! and in obeying it I save Helena. But what of Bella? and O God, what of myself?”