“I have every right,” she said, “to help my friends, and I want to help you and Philip. And indeed I do hope you ARE sorry. I hope you are miserable. And I’m glad you saw me kiss him. That was the first and the last time, and I did it because I was happy and glad for him; and because I love him too, but not in the least in the way he loves you. No one ever loved any one as he loves you. And it’s time you found it out. And if I have helped to make you find it out I’m glad, and I don’t care how much I hurt you.”
“Marion!” exclaimed Helen, “what does it mean? Do you mean that you are not engaged; that—”
“Certainly not,” Marion answered. “I am going to marry Reggie. It is you that Philip loves, and I am very sorry for you that you don’t love him.”
Helen clasped Marion’s hands in both of hers.
“But, Marion!” she cried, “I do, oh, I do!”
There was a thick yellow fog the next morning, and with it rain and a sticky, depressing dampness which crept through the window-panes, and which neither a fire nor blazing gas-jets could overcome.
Philip stood in front of the fireplace with the morning papers piled high on the centre-table and scattered over the room about him.
He had read them all, and he knew now what it was to wake up famous, but he could not taste it. Now that it had come it meant nothing, and that it was so complete a triumph only made it the harder. In his most optimistic dreams he had never imagined success so satisfying as the reality had proved to be; but in his dreams Helen had always held the chief part, and without her, success seemed only to mock him.
He wanted to lay it all before her, to say, “If you are pleased, I am happy. If you are satisfied, then I am content. It was done for you, and I am wholly yours, and all that I do is yours.”
And, as though in answer to his thoughts, there was an instant knock at the door, and Helen entered the room and stood smiling at him across the table.