, wholly coercive. "Can you understand
that the orderly serenity of your splendid house became a little
oppressive? It offered too glaring a contrast to my own state of mind
and outlook. I fancied my brain would be clearer, my conclusions more
just, here out of doors, face to face with this half-savage nature."

"Ah, I know all that," Richard said. Had not the blankness of the fog
brought him help this very morning?--"I know it, but I wish you did not
know it too."

"I know many things better not known," Helen replied. Her conscience
pricked her. She thanked her stars confession had ceased with
enlargement from the convent-school, and was a thing of the past. "You
see, I want to decide just how long I dare stay--if you will keep me?"

"We will keep you," Richard said.

"You are very charming to me, Dick," she exclaimed impulsively,
sincerely, again slightly abashed. "How long can I stay, I wonder,
without making matters worse in the end, both for my father and for
myself? I am young, after all, and I suppose I am tough. The cuticle of
the soul--if souls can have a cuticle--like that of the body, thickens
under repeated blows. But my father is no longer young. He is terribly
sensitive where I am concerned. And he is inevitably drawn into the
whirlpool of my wretched affair sooner or later. On his account I
should be glad to defer the return journey as long----"

"But--but--I don't understand," Richard broke out, pity and deep
concern for her, a blind fury against a person, or persons, unknown,
getting the better of him. "Who on earth has the power to plague you
and make you miserable, or your father either?"

The young man's face was white, his eyes full of pain, full of a great
love, burning down on her. As once, long ago, Helen de Vallorbes could
have danced and clapped her hands in naughty glee. For her hunting had
prospered above her fondest hopes. She had much ado to stifle the
laughter which bubbled up in her pretty throat. She was in the humour
to pelt peacocks royally, had such pastime been possible. As it was,
she closed her eyes for a little minute and waited, biting the inside
of her lip. At last, she said slowly, almost solemnly:--

"Don't you know that for certain mistakes, and those usually the most
generous, there is no redress?"

"What do you mean?" he demanded.

"Mean?--the veriest commonplace in my own case," she answered. "Merely
an unhappy marriage. There are thousands such."

They had lef