The scene between himself and Helen, to which the latter had alluded in her conversation with Dr. Ashton, was of far deeper import than her words might have seemed to imply. In the first shock of discovering that her work was broken she had been so overcome, that although she struggled bravely to conceal her feelings, she had excited the sculptor's keenest pity; and it not unnaturally followed that in attempting to express his sympathy he found himself telling his love before he was aware. He had determined to be silent upon this subject. Uncertain what were Helen's feelings towards him and restrained by a sense of loyalty to the bond which united him to Ninitta, he had resolved to bury his love in his own breast, at least until time gave him opportunity of honorably declaring it. Now circumstances betrayed him into an avowal of his passion; and he was not without the indignant feeling that Ninitta's act had freed him from all obligations to her. It might have required an ingenious casuist to arrive logically at the conclusion that an injury which the Italian had done to another released him from his plighted word, but the person injured was the woman he loved, and he blindly felt that Ninitta had struck at himself through his most sensitive feelings. He renounced all the fealty to which he had been held by a sense of honor, and he now poured out to Helen the full tide of his passionate love.
The sculptor was not a man to be lightly moved, but it is these calm, grave natures that once aroused are most irresistible. His passionate outburst took Helen unaware; she scarcely knew what she did, and she became suddenly aware of a truth so overwhelming that every thing else faded into insignificance beside it.
"I love you!" he cried out; and at the word she first knew, with a poignant pang of mingled bliss and anguish, that she too loved him.
It seemed to her that some power above her own volition ruled her, as in moments of high excitement the body sometimes appears to declare its independence of the will, and to act wholly by its own decisions. She was aware that she raised her eyes to his, although she would have given much to avoid his glance; and she knew that it was from what he read there that he took courage to fold her in his embrace.
Yet with his arms about her and his piercing kisses upon her face, Helen felt as if sinking helplessly into a mighty ocean; as if all struggles must be unavailing, and she could only yield to the resistless love which engulfed her.
From this first feeling of powerlessness, however, her strong nature sprang with a sharp recoil. She was too noble to surrender without a struggle. She would not even think whether she loved this man; that might be considered upon some safe vantage ground; now all energy must be concentrated upon escaping from the deadly peril in which she found herself.
Helen had freed herself as far as she was able from the marriage bond which had so galled her, and she was glad to forget that such a tie had ever existed, but she yet remembered that she was still a wife, and the kiss of a man not her husband overwhelmed her with shuddering humiliation and fear. She struggled from her lover's embrace with such an expression of terror upon her face, that he started back amazed and grieved.
He began to stammer confused words of contrition, of sorrow, of love, and of supplication.
"How could you!" she gasped. "Oh, leave me!"
There came into her excited mind a way of escape, upon which, even though it brought with it a sense of baseness, she seized in despair.