CHAPTER VII
AS LOVE APPORTIONS
After David had gone Helen sat gazing into the rich romance of the glowing logs, reproached by the remembrance of her treatment of David, awed by his long sacrifice, thrilled with love and the knowledge of his innocence. Her imagination showed her scenes of David's trial, of his prison life, of his struggles to regain place in the world, and she cried softly as she looked upon him amid these travails. That she had not believed in him despite appearance and his own declaration, she regarded as evidence of her weakness, and she told herself that her five years of suffering were too light a punishment for her lack of faith. She should have learned his innocence—and lost him!
Presently her mind, rehearsing the evening, came to David's statement that, for St. Christopher's sake, he must always remain a guilty man. She paused before the declaration. Yes, he was right. As she admitted this a calm fell upon her, and she saw, as she had not seen before, the distance that lay between them. He could not come to her; he was bound where he was. If they came together, she must go to him.
Could she go? She loved the ease and beauty which surrounded her; and this love now pointed out that going to him meant resigning all the comforts of her father's house, all things that thus far had comprised her life. And not alone resigning them, but substituting for them the cramped, mean surroundings of a poor man. Was the love of a poor man sufficient to balance, and balance for the rest of life, the good things that would be given up?
She had said to David with ringing joy, "I shall marry you anyhow!"—and now, with the same glow of the soul, she swept her present life out of consideration. Yes, she could give it up! But following immediately upon the impulse of renunciation came the realisation that David was not only a poor man—he was, and must be always, to the rest of the world a criminal. Was her love strong enough, and was she strong enough, to share a criminal's dishonour and struggles—even though she knew him to be guiltless?
While this question was asking itself her father entered, and with him her Aunt Caroline—in an ermine-lined opera cloak and a rustling cream-lace gown, about her plump throat a collar of pearls and in her gray hair a constellation of diamonds.
"Why, Helen, sitting here all alone, and at one o'clock!" her aunt cried. "Well, at any rate it means you're feeling better." Helen had had her dinner brought to her sitting-room, and had excused herself from the opera on the plea of indisposition.
Helen returned the kiss with which her aunt, bending over, lightly touched her cheek. She would have preferred to say nothing of David's visit, but she knew her aunt, who had charge of the servants, would doubtless learn of it on the morrow from the housekeeper.