'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.'