y: 'It's a wrong you do--to me--to our friendship, as well as to
yourself.'

Helen now spoke, and the tone of her voice arrested his attention even
before the meaning of her words reached him. It was a tone that he had
never heard from her, and it was not so much that it made him feel that
he had lost her as that it made him feel--strangely and
penetratingly--that he had never known her.

'You say all this to me, Gerald, you who in all these years have never
taken the trouble to wonder or think about me at all--except how I might
amuse you or advise you, or help you.' These were Helen's words. 'Why
should I go on considering you, who have never considered me?'

It was so sudden, so amazing, and so cruel that, turning to her, he
literally stared, open-eyed and open-mouthed. 'I don't know what you
mean, Helen,' he said.

'Of course you don't,' she continued in her measured voice, 'of course
you don't know what I mean; you never have. I don't blame you; you are
not imaginative, and all my life I've taken care that you should know
very little of what I meant. The only bit of me that you've known has
been the bit that has always been at your service. There is a good deal
more of me than that.'

'But--what have you meant?' he stammered, almost in tears.

Her face, white and cold, was bent on him, and in her little pause she
seemed to deliberate--not on what he should be told, that was fixed--but
on how to tell it; and for this she found finally short and simple
words.

'Can't you guess, even now, when at last I've become desperate and
indifferent?' she said. 'Can't you see, even now, that I've always loved
you?'

They confronted each other in a long moment of revelation and avowal. It
grew like a great distance between them, the distance of all the years
through which she had suffered and he been blind. Gerald saw it like a
chasm, dark with time, with secrecy, with his intolerable stupidity. He
gazed at her across it, and in her face, her strange, strong, fragile,
weary face, he saw it all, at last. Yes, she had loved him all her life,
and he had never seen it.

She had moved, in speaking to him, away from her place near the fire,
and he now went to it, and put his arms on the mantelpiece and hid his
face upon them. 'Fool--fool that I am!' he uttered softly. He stood so,
his face hidden from her, and his words seemed to release some bond in
Helen's heart. The worst of the bitterness against him passed away. The
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