"It is Helen. I'm in great luck. My exhibition in New York is a success and I am going to America immediately. I came to say good-bye."
"Helen!"
He had not waited to write the word. It came out quite clearly. He was drawing her nearer to him with his hand-clasp, as he had before. Now he would be touching her hair as he had before; but instead, his other hand, groping, had caught her arm. She was in a vise, dazed. Then all that she had reasoned out of herself came surging back in consuming possession of her. Oh, God, why would he do that! What did he mean? It could not be—no, it could not be! She tried to draw away, but the effort was only a quiver.
"I can write better. My pad, please," he murmured.
It seemed very heavy and then very light to her as she brought it, tremblingly, wonderingly. A peal of bells was ringing soft notes in her ears and her brain was numb. She watched each letter as it was written, tracing out her fate. For she had admitted the thing to her heart, now. She could never put it out.
"It is hard to explain, but something told me that it was you—your spirit, your touch, that first day when I should have slipped but for you—and yet I knew it could not be. The pain devils never let me think quite clearly. Then you had seemed to avoid me and Henriette had said she would wait. It was understood with Henriette. It must be she; it was her place—and all the while your spirit, your touch, you in my mind and her face, her presence, and it hurt me to think that you neglected me. This awful wound—and you said that you were Henriette when I could not see and it should have been Henriette. And I was always thinking, musing, in my poor, hazy way of the girl with her cartoons and sketches—of you as I saw you seated against the wheat shock, across the table at Truckleford, rise on the other side of the shell-hole—everywhere you, the spirit of you—that, well, it had me. Then I found out what the plot was and I was happy and about to tell you, when the pain devils interfered. Then I concluded to wait. Being shut up in my own world, perhaps I liked to watch the play. If you could take Henriette's place and deceive me, how could you care for me? I enjoyed the comedy yesterday at Lady Truckleford's with something akin to your own mischievousness. But when you say that you are going away—well, I can't let you go if there is any way of keeping you. Only you must not go without knowing that it is you, your spirit, which has pulled me through—you that I love. And you—do you care?"
"Big and little, all kinds of yes, in every language!" she replied. "Yes, every hour through all these weeks and long before that."
"I like the way you say it—it is so like you!" he wrote in answer. And he drew her close to him again and held her so for a long time.
"I was about to——" Mischief and happiness were mixed in her explanation of the thing that Bricktop was about to undertake on her behalf.
"It does not matter to me—not if your nose were twice as large."