'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.'