He wanted help from her, but she gave him none, and again there was a silence in which Jim came through the door and put his head into Helen's hand.
"Jim!" she said, "Jim!" Her thoughts went across a continent to blue water.
"I'd begun to love her," he explained, and moved from one foot to the other.
"George, I must go in."
"But I don't love her now," he added fiercely, with pride, almost with reassurance.
She would have laughed if she had heard him, but her numbness had passed by and all her powers were given to resisting the conviction that she was indeed Helen Caniper, born, to die, a woman; that Zebedee was on the sea, and had not ceased to love her, that she would have a tale to tell him on his return, and a dishonoured body to elude his arms, but she could not resist the knowledge, and under its gathering strength she cried out in a fury of pain that drove Halkett back a step.
"What is it?" he asked.
She did not answer. Her rage and misery left her weak and hopeless and though for a bright, flaming instant she had loathed him, she was now careless of him and of herself because nothing mattered any more.
She drooped against the door, and he approached her nervously, saying as he went, "You're tired. You ought to go to bed. I'll take you to the house."
That roused her and she looked at him. "No. Some one might hear."