"I am sure that God must help you," cried Marion, "else you could never learn so many wise and hard things."
Helen looked at her with a little surprise in her clear blue eyes. "Of course He helps me," she answered. "When does He not help those who ask Him?"
"O Helen! if I only had your faith!" exclaimed Marion, with positive pain in her voice. "How easy it would make things!"
"Yes," replied Helen, with her sweet smile, "it does make things easy."
But before Marion could complete her preparations for departure, she was obliged to see Mr. George Singleton again and yet again. He came in the first place to remonstrate forcibly against her intentions with regard to the fortune, and found her society sufficiently attractive to induce him to pay inordinately long visits after he had discovered that his remonstrances were vain. "He is certainly very unconventional," Marion observed after one of these visits. "He does not strike one so much as violating social usage, as being ignorant of and holding it in contempt. In essential things he is a gentleman; but that his father—one of the most refined and fastidious of men—should have had a son who is half a savage, strikes me as very strange."
Young Singleton did not hesitate to speak of himself as altogether a savage, and to declare that the strain of wild lawlessness in his nature had brought about the estrangement between his father and himself. "Of course I am sorry for it all now," he said frankly to Marion; "but I don't see how it could have been avoided, we were so radically different in disposition and tastes. My father was a man to whom the conventionalties of life were of first importance, who held social laws and usages as more binding than the Decalogue; while I—well, a gypsy has as much regard for either as I had. I irritated and outraged him even when I had least intention of doing so; and he, in turn, roused all the spirit of opposition in me. I do not defend my conduct, but I think I may honestly say that he had something for which to blame himself. We were miserable together, and it ended as you know. He said when we parted that he had no longer a son, and I took him at his word—perhaps too literally. And that being so, Miss Lynde—his renunciation of me having been complete, and my acceptance of it complete also,—I really do not think that I have a right to come and take all his fortune."
"I am sorry if you have scruples on the subject, Mr. Singleton," Marion answered, quietly. "They ought to have occurred to you before you moved in the matter; now they are too late. I can not possibly accept the odium of holding a man's fortune when his own son is alive and has claimed it."
"But you know that I have always said I should be satisfied with part—"
Marion lifted her hand with a silencing gesture. "I know," she said, "that the affair is finally settled, and not to be discussed anymore. I am satisfied, and that ought to satisfy you. Now let us talk of something else. Are you aware that I am going abroad?"
"No," he replied, quickly, with a startled look. "Where are you going?"