The girl answered quietly: “I could not let you apologize to me, Mr. Harrison, for I never once thought that you had done anything wrong.”
“I have done very wrong indeed,” he answered, his voice trembling, “for I do not think that I had any right even to ask you to marry me. You make me feel suddenly how very coarse a world I have lived in, and how much lower than yours all my ways of thinking are. You look surprised that I say that,” he added, as he saw that the girl was about to interrupt him, “but you do not know much about the world. Do you suppose that there are many women in society who would hesitate to marry me for my money?”
“I do not know,” said Helen, slowly; “but, Mr. Harrison, you could certainly never be happy with a woman who would do that.”
“I do not think now that I should,” the man replied, earnestly, “but I did not feel that way before. I did not have much else to offer, Helen, for money is all that a man like me ever tries to get in the world.”
“It is so very wrong, Mr. Harrison,” put in the other, quickly. “When people live in that way they come to lose sight of all that is right and beautiful in life; and it is all so selfish and wicked!” (Those were words which might have made Mr. Howard smile a trifle had he been there to hear them; but Helen was too much in earnest to think about being original.)
“I know,” said Mr. Harrison, “and I used to believe in such things; but one never meets anyone else that does, and it is so easy to live differently. When you spoke to me as you did just now, you made me seem a very poor kind of a person indeed.”
The man paused, and Helen sat gazing at him with a worried look upon her face. “It was not that which I meant to do,” she began, but then she stopped; and after a long silence, Mr. Harrison took up the conversation again, speaking in a low, earnest voice.
“Helen,” he said, “you have made me see that I am quite unworthy to ask for your regard,—that I have really nothing fit to offer you. But I might have one thing that you could appreciate,—for I could worship, really worship, such a woman as you; and I could do everything that I could think of to make myself worthy of you,—even if it meant the changing of all my ways of life. Do you not suppose that you could quite forget that I was a rich man, Helen, and still let me be devoted to you?”
There was a look in Mr. Harrison's eyes as he gazed at her just then which made him seem to her a different sort of a man,—as indeed he was. She answered very gently. “Mr. Harrison,” she said, “it would be a great happiness to me to know that anyone felt so about me. But I could never marry you; I do not love you.”
“And you do not think,” asked the other, “that you could ever come to love me, no matter how long I might wait?”