“Oh, there is the other kind of woman,” said Helen, trying rather unsuccessfully to smile. “This is only my way of loving. I am not ashamed of it.”
“Ashamed of it? It honors you! It glorifies you!”
He held out his arms; but she did not swerve towards them; they dropped. She seemed to him encompassed in a shining cloud, in which her own celestial tenderness and candor had wrapped and protected her.
“Love me!” he pleaded. “Love me, trust me, till we can think. I must do right by you, whatever it means to me.”
“We love each other,” repeated Helen, holding out her hands, “and I trust you. Let us live on that a little while, till we—till you”—
But she faltered, and her courage forsook her when she looked up into his face. All the anguish of the man that the woman cannot share, and may not understand, started out in visible lines and signs upon his features; all the solemn responsibility for her, for himself, and for the unknown consequences of their sacred passion; the solitary burden, which it is his to wear in the name of love, and which presses hardest upon him whose spirit is higher and stronger than mere human joy.
But at this moment a sound was heard upon the stone steps of the Queen Anne house. It was the footfall of the Professor himself, returning from his closing lecture of the series on Eschatology. Mrs. Carruth pattered behind him with short, stout steps. She had wound the affairs of the Association for Assisting Indigent Married Students with Blankets, to a condition in which they could run along without her till the exegetical trip to the German Professor’s in Berlin should be over, and the slush of Cesarea should know her again.