"I have just come from inquiring as to the result of the operation," said Henriette. "He is resting easily. As you know, he is really a distant cousin of Helen's and mine and we were all fond of one another. We had such good times together at Mervaux. It was so fine of him to stay and fight instead of going home. Then this! You can't imagine the shock of it!"
"Terrible!" gasped Lady Violet. "We all know what it means to you."
"And even more to Helen!" said Henriette. "Poor Helen! She was utterly devoted to him and he to her. She has stood by so bravely, insisting that he will get his sight and hearing back and that Bricktop will remake him as good as new. When I think of him as I last saw him and how Helen is suffering—it's too horrible!"
With a weary drooping of her lashes, she said that she was too tired to think of coming down to dinner and went to her room, where, after she had bathed her face and taken down her hair, her reflection in the mirror in its faultless outline was a reflection of something in her cosmos which could have no part with deformities of any kind, and her relief was infinite over the gate that Helen had providentially opened. She hastened to write to her mother, the letter a symbol of cutting a chain with the past:
"... I saw it—a monstrous wound of the jaw. He is deaf, blind, speechless. They say that he will live. I need not tell you what a day it has been for Helen and me! When I thought of his gallant conduct at Mervaux in refusing to leave Helen there alone, of our fun over the portrait and the cartoons, and all that he meant to his father and mother, the thought of what has happened to him was too horrible for words. I am glad that when he became épris I did not encourage him. Now I see that his real fondness was for Helen. He asks for her, wants her near him. She is a great comfort to him and her feeling for him is deeper than either of us realised. I hope you will give up your trip to Truckleford, travelling conditions are so abominable."
To which Madame Ribot consented, as she was no longer interested in Peter Smithers's visit.
Helen, after she had separated from her sister on the path, had thought little of what had passed between them. Her mind was too intensely objective. Anything to make Phil well! It did not matter how it was done or who did it. Upon her return to her room she gathered up her drawing materials, which seemed to belong to her in some other incarnation, and put them in a drawer. It was as if her life was Phil's; his wound hers. She wrote the promised letter to Truckleford, and then she prayed for Phil; and after she had prayed to the God above, she clenched her fists and murmured: "Will! Must!" in the face of all the hard little gods below who seem to get a good deal out of the hand of the God above.