“You could go right home,” said the old man gently. “The house is open, and the servants are there. I am sure your mother will wish it, whenever she is acquainted with the facts.”
“We won’t tell Mother, just yet, Papa—not till we must, you know. Perhaps Mr. Bayard won’t—won’t take me!”
The Professor straightened himself, and looked about with a guilty air. He felt as if he were party to an elopement. Eager, ardent, boyishly sympathetic with Helen’s position, quivering with that perfect thoughtfulness which she never found in any other than her father’s heart, the Professor of dogmatic Orthodox Theology flung himself into the emergency as tenderly as if he had never written a lecture on Foreordination, or preached a sermon on the Inconceivability of Second Probation.
It was he, indeed, and none other, who summoned Bayard to Helen’s presence at an early hour of the morning; and to the credit of the Department, and of the ancient Seminary in whose stern faith the kindest graces of character and the best graciousness of manner have never been extinguished, be it said that Professor Haggai Carruth did not once remind Emanuel Bayard that he was meeting the consequences of unsoundness, and the natural fate of heresy. Nobly sparing the young man any reference to his undoubtedly deserved misfortune, the Professor only said:—
“Helen, here is Mr. Bayard,” and softly shut the door.
Helen’s hearty color was quite gone. Such a change had touched her, that Bayard uttered an exclamation of horror, and took her impetuously in his arms.
“Love, what ails you?” he cried with quick anxiety.
Arrived at the moment when she must speak, if ever, Helen’s courage and foresight failed her utterly. She found herself no nearer to knowing what to say, or how to say it, than she had been at the first moment when she heard the girls talking on the rocks. To tell him her fears, and the grounds for them, would be the fatal blunder. How could she say to a man like Bayard: “Your life is in danger. Come on a wedding-trip, and save yourself!” Yet how could she quibble, or be dumb before the truth!
Following no plan, or little, preacted part, but only the moment’s impulse of her love and her trouble, Helen broke into girlish sobs, the first that he had ever heard from her, and hid her wet face against his cheek.