She came up close to him. The sun had set and the valley lay in silence. When he saw her eyes there were tears in them—tears so full and deep that they hurt him when she said:
“It can never—never be—now. You made me love you when you could not love; and love born of despair is mateless ever; it would die in its realization. Mine, for you, was that—” She pointed to the sunset. “It breathed and burned. I saw it only because of clouds, of shadow. But were the clouds, the shadows, gone—”
“There would be no life, no burning, no love,” he said. “Ah, I think I understand,” and his heart sank with pain. What—why—he could not say, only he knew it hurt him, and he began to wonder.
“You do not blame me,” she said as she still held his hand and looked up into his eyes in the old way he had seen, that terrible night at Millwood.
For reply he held her hand in both of his and then laid it over his heart. She felt his tears fall on it, tears, which even death could not bring, had come to Richard Travis at last, and he wondered. In the old life he never wondered—he always knew; but in this—this new life—it was all so strange, so new that he feared even himself. Like a sailor lost, he could only look up, by day, helplessly at the sun, and, by night, helplessly at the stars.
“Helen—Helen,” he said at last, strangely shaken in it all,—“if I could tell you now that I do—that I could love—”
She put her hand over his mouth in the old playful way and shook her head, smiling through her tears: “Do not try to mate my love with a thing that balks.”
It was simply said, and forceful. It was enough. Richard Travis blushed for very shame.
“Do you not see,” she said, “how hopeless it is? Do you not know that I was terribly tempted—weak—maddened—deserted that night? That now I know what Clay's love has been? Oh, why do we not learn early in life that fire will burn, that death will kill, that we are the deed of all we think and feel—the wish of all we will to be?”
Travis turned quickly: “Is that true? Then let me wish—as I do, Helen; let me wish that I might love you as you deserve.”