From sheer inability to speak, the man could only fall back in his chair and stare dumbly.
"Please, please don't look at me like that," besought the young woman frenziedly. "It's just as if you said you couldn't help me. But you can! I know you can. And I can do it. I know that, too. I read it in a book, once, about a girl who—who was like me. And she went away and got perfectly grand clothes, and learning, and all; and then she came back; and he—he didn't know her at first—her husband, and he fell in love with her all over again. And she didn't have near so much money as I've got. Doctor, you will help me?"
The doctor, with his shocked, amazed eyes on the piteously pleading face opposite, threw up his hands in despair.
"But I—you—Burke— Oh, Heavens, my dear lady! How utterly, utterly impossible this all is! Come, come, what am I thinking of?—and you with not even your hat off yet! And that child! I'll call Hawkins at once. He and his wife are all there are left here, just now,—my sister's at the beach. But they'll make you and little Miss Dorothy Elizabeth here comfortable for the night. Then, to-morrow, after a good sleep, we'll—we'll fix it all up. I'll get Burke on the long distance, and—"
"Dr. Gleason," interrupted Helen Denby, with a calmness that would have deceived him had he not seen her eyes, "my husband isn't worrying about me. He thinks I'm at home now. When he finds I'm not, he'll think I've gone to my old home town where he told me to go for a visit. He won't worry then. So that's all right. Don't you see? He's sent me away—sent me. If you tell him now that I am here, I will walk right straight out of that door, and neither you nor him nor anybody else I know shall ever see me again."
"Oh, come, come," protested the doctor, again helplessly.
Once more Helen interrupted.
"Doctor, why can't you be straight with me?" she pleaded. "I had to come to you. There wasn't anybody else I could go to. And there isn't any other way out of it—but this. I tell you I've been doing some thinking. All the way down here it's been just think, think, think."
The doctor wet his lips.
"But, if—if Burke knew—"