Rathborne stepped forward, with his own hand extended. "Forgive me for startling you," he said; "but this was my only chance to see you, and I felt that I must do so."
"Why?" asked Helen. She closed the door, but did not give her hand. "There is no reason, that I am aware of, why you should wish to see me," she added, in a voice which trembled a little. "Everything has been said that need be said between us."
"On your side, perhaps so," he answered; "but not on mine. I have said nothing. You have given me no opportunity to say anything. You have condemned me unheard."
"Condemned you! No," she replied. "I have never had any intention or desire to condemn you. On the contrary, I said from the first that I did not blame you for what was probably beyond your power to control. But I desired that all might be ended between us; and, that being so, there is nothing more to say on a subject that is—that must be—painful to you as well as to me."
"It will not be painful if I can induce you to listen to me and to believe me," he said. "That is what I have come this morning to beg of you—the opportunity to set myself right. Appoint a time when I can come and find you alone, or meet me where you will. Only give me the opportunity to justify myself to you."
He spoke with an earnest pleading which was by no means simulated, for he never lost the consciousness of how much for him depended upon this; and that the pleading had an effect upon Helen was evident in her growing pallor, in the look of pain that darkened her eyes. But she answered, with a firmness on which he had not reckoned:—
"You should not ask of me something which could not serve any good end. No explanation can alter facts, and I would rather not discuss them. What happened was very natural. No one knows that better than I. But nothing can efface it now."
"Not if you heard that I was led into folly by every possible art?" he demanded, carried beyond self-control by the unforeseen difficulty of bending one who had always before seemed so pliant to his influence. "Not if I proved to you that your cousin—"
Helen lifted her hand with a gesture which had in it something of a command. "Not another word like that," she said. "I will not listen to it. If what you imply were true, how would it help matters? A man who is weak enough to be led away by the art of another is as little to be trusted as the man who deliberately breaks his faith. He may not be as blamable—I do not say that,—but one could never repose confidence in him again. That is over."
"Helen!" said Rathborne. He was amazed, almost confounded, by a dignity of manner and tone which he had not only never seen in Helen before, but of which he would not have believed her capable. He did not reckon on the judgment and strength which earnest prayer had brought, nor did it occur to him that the worst place he could have chosen for the exertion of his influence was the threshold of the church, where day after day she had come to beg for the direction that in such a crisis would surely not be denied her. "I hardly know you," he went on, in the tone of one deeply wounded. "How changed you are!—how cold! What has become of the sweet and gentle Helen I have known and loved?"