“What do you mean?”
She turned quickly toward him.
“Every one knows how much you are suffering in spite of your brave attempt to keep it to yourself. Why won’t you let me help you, Helen?”
“Who is ‘every one’?” she demanded.
“Why—your uncle Peabody and I and—the contessa,” stammered Emory.
“You and Uncle Peabody think I am suffering?”
“We know it!”
Helen held her head very high in the air, and spoke in a superior tone so obviously assumed as a cloak to disguise her real feelings, that Emory regretted that he had forced the subject upon her; but now it had gone too far to draw back.
“If you know that, perhaps you know the cause of it as well?”
“We do. Jack—”