Helen smiled in the darkness. "Gifford"—she began.
But he interrupted her, flinging his head back, in impatient despair. "No, it cannot be, or it would have been, don't you see? Don't encourage me, Helen; the kindest thing you can do is to kill any hope the instant it shows its head. There was a time, I was fool enough to think—it was just after the engagement was broken. But I soon saw from her letters there was no chance for me."
"But Gifford,"—Helen almost forgot to protect Lois, in her anxiety to help him,—"you must not think that. They were never engaged."
Gifford stood still and looked at her; then he said something in a low voice, which she could not hear.
"I must not say another word," she said hurriedly. "I've no right even to speak as I did. But oh, Gifford, I could not see you lose a chance of happiness. Life is so short, and there is so much sorrow! I even selfishly wanted the happiness of your joy, for my own sake."
Still Gifford did not speak; he turned sharply on his heel, and began his restless walk. His silence was getting unbearable, when he stopped, and said gently, "I thank you, Helen. I do not understand it all, but that's no matter. Only, don't you see, it doesn't make any difference? If she had been going to care, I should have known it long ago."
This was very vague to Helen; she wondered if Lois had refused him again. But Gifford began to talk quietly of his life in Mercer, and she did not venture to say anything more. "After all, they must work out their own salvation," she thought. "No one can help them, when they both know the facts."
She listened a little absently to Gifford, who was speaking of the lack of any chance for advancement in Mercer. "But really," he added, "I ought not to go too far away from my aunts, now; and I believe that the highest development of character can come from the most commonplace necessities of life." Helen sighed; she wondered if this commonplace of Ashurst were her necessity? For again she was searching for her place in the world,—the place that needed her, and was to give her the happiness of usefulness; and she had even thought vaguely that she might find some work in Lockhaven, among John's people, and for them. They both fell into the silence of their own thoughts, until the rector and his daughter came back from church, and Gifford went home.
That next week was a thoughtful one with Gifford Woodhouse; Helen's words had stirred those buried hopes, and it was hard to settle back into a life of renunciation. He was strangely absent-minded in his office. One day Willie Denner, who had come to read law, and was aspiring to be his clerk, found him staring out of the window, with a new client's papers lying untouched before him. After all, he thought, would it be wrong, would it trouble Lois (he had said he should never trouble her), if he just told her how the thought of her helped him, how she was a continual inspiration in his life? "If I saw it bothered her, I could stop," he argued.
And so, reasoning with himself, he rode over from Mercer late that Saturday night. The little ladies were, as usual, delighted to see him. These weekly visits were charming; their nephew could be admired and fussed over to their hearts' content, but was off again before they had time to feel their small resources at an end. The next morning he dutifully went to church with them. Sunday was a proud day for the Misses Woodhouse; each took an arm of the young man, whose very size made him imposing, and walked in a stately way to the door of St. Michael's. They would gladly have been supported by him to their pew, but it would have been, Miss Deborah said, really flaunting their nephew in the faces of less fortunate families, for Ashurst could not boast of another young man.