"Go on—"
"Give the cinders a little time to fall, Geoffrey!" she said in a faltering voice.
He looked up ardently.
"Why? It's only the living fire that matters! Darling—let's come to close quarters. You gave a bit of your warm heart to Philip, and you imagined that it meant much more than it really did. And poor Philip all the time was determined—cribbed and cabined—by his past,—and now by his boy. We both know that if he marries anybody it will be Cynthia Welwyn; and that he would be happier and less lonely if he married her. But so long as your life is unsettled he will marry nobody. He remembers that your mother entrusted you to him in the firm belief that, in his uncertainty about his wife, he neither could nor would marry anybody. So that for these two years, at any rate, he holds himself absolutely bound to his compact with her and you."
"And the moral of that is—" said Helena, flushing.
"Marry me!—Nothing simpler. Then the compact falls—and at one stroke you bring two men into port."
The conflict of expressions passing through her features showed her shaken. He waited.
"Very well, Geoffrey—" she said at last, with a long, quivering breath, as though some hostile force rent her and came out.
"If you want me so much—take me!"
But as she spoke she became aware of the lover in him ready to spring.
She drew back instantly from his cry of joy, and his outstretched arms.