He laid a quick hand on hers that was resting in her lap. "I'll never hate you and you'll never be commonplace. Dear woman—can't you?"
She shook her head; the tears stood suddenly in her leaf-brown eyes.
"Helena!" he said, and there was a half-frightened violence in his voice; "what is it? Tell me, for Heaven's sake; what is it? Do you hate me?"
"No—no—no!"
"If you dislike me, say so! I think I could bear it better to believe you disliked me."
"Robert, how absurd you are! You know I could never dislike you. But our—our age, and David, and—"
He put an abrupt hand on her shoulder and looked hard into her eyes; then for a single minute he covered his own. "Don't talk about age, and all that nonsense. Don't talk about little things, Helena, for God's sake! Oh, my dear—" he said, brokenly. He got up and went across the room to a bookcase; he stood there a moment or two with his back to her. Helena Richie, bewildered, her eyes full of tears, looked after him in dismay. But when he took his chair again, he was "commonplace" enough, and when, later, David came in, he was able to talk in the most matter-of-fact way. He told the young man that evidently Mrs. Maitland had changed her mind about a hospital. "Of course some papers may turn up that will entitle you to your fund, but I confess I'm doubtful about it. I'm afraid she changed her mind."
"Probably she did," David said, laconically; "well, I am glad she thought of it,—even if she didn't do it. She was a big person, Mr. Ferguson; I didn't half know how big a person she was!" For a moment his face softened until his own preoccupations faded out of it.
"Nobody knew how big she was—except me," Robert Ferguson said. Then he began to talk about her. . . . It was nearly midnight when he ended; when he did, it was with an outburst of pain and grief: "Nobody understood her. They thought because she ran an iron-works, that she wasn't—a woman. I tell you she was! I tell you her heart was a woman's heart. She didn't care about fuss and feathers, and every other kind of tomfoolery, like all the rest of you, but she was as—as modest as a girl, and as sensitive. You needn't laugh—"
"Laugh?" said Helena Richie; "I am ready to cry when I think how her body misrepresented her soul!"