"Dead or alive," she said quickly, "he is more to me than you ever can be!"
"Helen!" there was a note of angry protest in Ainley's voice. "You cannot think what you are saying. You must have forgotten how I love you."
"No," answered the girl deliberately. "I have not forgotten."
"Then you are forgetting what I have endured for you—all the toil and travail of these weeks of search—the risks I have taken to find you, the risks I took this morning. Stane may have done something heroic in saving you from the river, I don't know, but I do know that, as you told me months ago, you were a hero-worshipper, and I beg of you not to be misled by a mere romantic emotion. I have risked my life a score of times to serve you. This morning I saved you from something worse than death, and surely I deserve a little consideration at your hands. Will you not think again? Since heroism is your fetish, can you find nothing heroic in my labours, in my service?"
The man was in deadly earnest, pleading for something on which his heart was set, and whatever dissimulation there had been in his narrative, there was none whatever in his pleadings. But Helen remembered how her lover had gone to prison for this man's deed, and her heart was like a flint, her tone as cold as ice as she answered him.
"You do not understand," she said, "you have not yet heard my story. When you have, whatever I may owe you, you will not press me again."
"Tell me the story then," cried Ainley in a voice hoarse with passion. "And for God's sake, be quick about it!"
CHAPTER XXIII