"Some day perhaps, Helena," he said, "you could learn to love me—for I would teach you. Perhaps now you feel that your whole duty lies here in this work to which you have so unselfishly given your life; but I would not hinder that, only try to help as best I could. Perhaps I have been abrupt, have spoken too soon—it is only a few weeks since I saw you first, but it seems as though in those few weeks I had come to know you as if I had known you all my life and—"
But now she interrupted him, shaking her head in a sad little fashion.
"You do not know me," she said. "Sometimes I think I do not know myself. Think! You do not know where I came from to join the Patriarch here; you have no single shred of knowledge about me; you do not know a single particular of my life before you knew me."
"I do not need to know," he answered gravely. "You are as genuine as pure gold is genuine—it is in your voice, your smile, your eyes. It is a crude simile perhaps, but one never asks where the pure gold was dug—it stands for itself, for what it is, because it is what it is—pure gold—at its face value."
The words seemed to stab at Helena, condemning, accusing; and yet, too, in a strange, vague way, they seemed to bring her a hope, a promise for the days to come—at face value! If she could live hereafter—at face value!
"Listen," she said, and her voice was very low. "I do not know how to say what I must say to you. Last night I knew that—that you loved me. I had not thought of you like that, in that way, until then, or—or I should have tried never to have let this hurt come to you. But last night I knew, and since then I have known that sooner or later you would—would tell me of it." She stopped for an instant—her eyes full of tears now. "And so," she went on presently, "I have let you speak to-night because it was better, it was even necessary that I should do so
at once—because this could not go on—because you must go away and—"
"Necessary?" he repeated. "I—I do not understand."
"No," she said helplessly; "you do not understand—and I—I cannot explain. Oh, I do not know what to say to you, only that you must take what I say, as you have taken me—at face value."
"I do not understand," he said again. "Helena, I do not understand. Are you in trouble—tell me?"