To the end of her life Helen will see the look on Emanuel Bayard’s face when she had spoken these words.
With more of terror than delight, the woman’s nature sprang, for that instant, back upon itself. Would she have recalled what she had said? It is possible; for now she understood how he loved her, and perceived that she had never understood what a man’s love is.
Yet, when he spoke, it was with that absence of drama, with that repression amounting almost to commonplace, which characterize the intensest crises of experience.
“Do you?” he said. “Have you?”
And at first that was all. But his voice shook, and his hand; and his face went so white that he seemed like a man smitten rather by death than by love.
Helen, in a pang of maiden fright, had moved away from him, and retreated to the sofa; he sank beside her silently. Leaning forward a little, he covered his eyes with one hand. The other rested on the cushion within an inch of her purple dress; he did not touch her; he did not touch it. Helen felt sorry, seeing him so troubled and wrung; her heart went out in a throb of that maternal compassion which is never absent from the love of any woman for any man.
“Oh,” she sighed, “I meant to make you happy, to give you comfort! And now I have made you unhappy!”
“You have made me the happiest of all miserable men!”
He raised his head, and looked at her till hers was the face to fall.
“Oh, don’t!” she pleaded. “Not like that!”