"Laura!" cried a strong voice. And, with a spring, Helbeck was beside her, capturing both her cold hands in one of his, a mingled tenderness and wrath flashing from him before which she shrank. But though she drew away from him—her small face so white below the broad black hat!—she was not quelled. Before he could speak, she had said in sharp separate words, hardly above a whisper:
"It is that horrible egotism of religion that poisons everything! And if—if one shared it, well and good, one might make terms with it, like a wild thing one had tamed. But outside it, and at war with it, what can one do but hate—hate—hate—it!"
"My God!" he said in bewilderment, "where am I to begin?"
He stared at her with a passionate amazement. Never before had she shown such forces of personality, or been able to express herself with an utterance so mature and resonant. Her stature had grown before his eyes. In the little frowning figure there was something newly, tragically fine. The man for the first time felt his match. His own hidden self rose at last to the struggle with a kind of angry joy, eager at once to conquer the woman and to pierce the sceptic.
"Listen to me, Laura!" he said, bending over her. "That was more than I can bear—that calls me out of my tent. I have tried to keep my poor self out of sight, but it has rights. You have challenged it. Will you take the consequences?"
She trembled before the pale concentration of his face and bent her head.
"I will tell you," he said in a low determined voice, "the only story that a man truly knows—the story of his own soul. You shall know—what you hate."
And, after a pause of thought, Helbeck made one of the great efforts of his life.
* * * * *
He did not fully know indeed what it was that he had undertaken, till the wave of emotion had gathered through all the inmost chambers of memory, and was bearing outward in one great tide the secret nobilities, the hidden poetries, the unconscious weaknesses, of a nature no less narrow than profound, no less full of enmities than of loves.