"I am going abroad at once—to-morrow; and I hope you will continue your preparations for your journey. And now, good by—I am too ill to endure another word to-day."
He loosened the hold she had taken on his arm in her excitement, and almost staggered out of the room and down the stairs.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
A STRANGE MARRIAGE.
HEN Percy returned to his apartments he found a letter from Helena awaiting him. It was written in reply to his, posted to her before leaving Centerville.
His head was aching, and his vision blurred strangely as he read the written words. It began without an address, abruptly.
"I, too, have worshiped an ideal all my life. A man without reproach, and above dishonor. A man strong in all manly attributes, strong in his loves and his emotions, but strong, too, in his pride, and in his will power. I think God never bestows the one without the other; but man too often cultivates the former and leaves the latter unused. For the ideal I so worshiped, I kept my heart free and my soul unsullied. When you came, all unconsciously I invested you with the attributes of my ideal. All unconsciously—until too late to place a guard upon my unwise heart—it poured out its long-hidden treasures. So suddenly the knowledge came upon me, that I betrayed to you what had been wiser to conceal. Wiser, because added to the Creator's uneven distribution of pains and penalties, the world bestows its merciless condemnation upon the woman who reveals that which is so difficult to hide.