"You can forgive him without going back to him. Why should you risk your life?"
"It is the only way of showing him that I forgive him, and my life will not be in danger."
"Do you think that you can ever be happy again, if you go back to him?" asked Wimpole.
"My happiness is not the question. The only thing that matters is to do right."
"It seems to me that right is more or less dependent on its results--"
"Never!" cried Helen, almost fiercely, and drawing back a little against the side of the window. "If one syllable of that were true, then we could never know whether we were doing right or not, till we could judge the result. And the end would justify the means, always, and there would be no more right and wrong at all in the world."
"But when you know the results?" objected Wimpole. "It seems to me that it may be different."
"Then it is fear! Then one is afraid to do right because one knows that one risks being hurt! What sort of morality would that be? It would be contemptible."
"But suppose that it is not only yourself who may be hurt, but some one else? One should think of others first. That is right, too." He could not help saying that much.
Helen hesitated a moment.