After his departure Helen turned on Darrow.
"You were positively insulting!" she cried, "and in my house! How could you?"
"Helen," said Darrow, facing her squarely, "I maintained rigidly all the outer forms of politeness. That is as far as I will go anywhere with that man. My statement to him is quite just; he has no humanity."
"What do you mean? Why are you so bitter?" asked Helen, a little subdued in her anger by the young man's evident earnestness.
"You never knew Doctor Schermerhorn, did you, Helen?" he asked.
"The funny little old German? Indeed, I did! He was a dear!"
"He was one of the greatest scientists living—and he was a dear! That goes far to explain him—a gentle, wise, child-like, old man—with imagination and a Heaven-seeking soul. He picked me up as a boy, and was a father to me. I was his scientific assistant until he was killed, murdered by the foulest band of pirates. Life passes; and that is long ago."
He fell silent a moment; and the girl looked on this unprecedented betrayal of feeling with eyes at once startled and sympathetic.
"Doctor Schermerhorn," went on Darrow in his usual faintly tired, faintly cynical tone, "worked off and on for five years on a certain purely scientific discovery, the nature of which you would not understand. In conversation he told its essentials to this Eldridge. Doctor Schermerhorn fell sick of a passing illness. When he had recovered, the discovery had been completed and given to the scientific world."
"Oh!" cried Helen. "What a trick!"