Gerald turned from the window at this. He had come down from the heights and knew that he had risen there too lightly, and that the tangles of lower realities must be unravelled before he could be free to mount again—Helen with him. He knew, at last, that he had made Helen very angry and that it might take some time to disentangle things; but the radiance of the heights was with him still, and if, to Helen's eye, he looked fatuous, to Franklin, seeing his face now, for the first time, he looked radiant.
'Helen,' he said, smiling gravely at her, 'what Kane says is very sensible. He is the one person in the world one could have such things out before. Let's have them out; let's put the case to him and he shall be umpire.'
Helen bent her ironic and implacable gaze upon him and remained silent.
'You think I've no right to put it before him, I suppose.'
'You most certainly have no right. And you would gain nothing by it. What I told you just now was true.'
'I can't accept that.'
'Then you are absurd.'
'Very well, I am absurd, then. But there's one thing I have a right to tell Kane,' Gerald went on, unsmiling now. 'I owe it to him to tell him. He'll think badly of me, I know; but that can't be helped. We've all got into a dreadful muddle and the only way out of it is to be frank. So I must tell you, Kane, that Althea and I have found out that we have made a mistake; we can't hit it off. I'm not the man to make her happy and she feels it, I'm sure she feels it. It's only for my sake, I know, that she hasn't broken off long ago. You are in love with Althea, and I am in love with Helen; so there it is. I'm only saying what we are all seeing.' Gerald spoke gravely, yet at the same time with a certain blitheness, as though he took it for granted, for Franklin as well as for himself, that he thus made both their paths clear and left any hazardous element in their situations the same for both. Would Althea have Franklin and would Helen have him? This was really all that now needed elucidation.
A heavy silence followed his words. In the silence the impression that came to Gerald was as if one threw reconnoitring pebbles into a well, expecting a swift response of shallowness, and heard instead, after a wondering pause, the hollow reverberations of sombre, undreamed-of depths. Franklin's eyes were on him and Helen's eyes were on him, and he knew that in both their eyes he had proved himself once more, to say the least of it, absurd.
'Mr. Digby,' said Franklin Kane, and his voice was so strange that it sounded indeed like the fall of the stone in far-off darkness, 'perhaps you are saying what we all see; but perhaps we don't all see the same things in the same way; perhaps,' Franklin went on, finding his way, 'you don't even see some things at all.'