e added, 'And see here, dear, you
mustn't delay a moment in letting Gerald know. Come, write him a note
now, and I'll have it sent to his club so that he shall hear right
away.'

CHAPTER XXIX.

Helen woke next morning after unbroken, heavy slumbers, with a mind as
vague and empty as a young child's. All night long she had been dreaming
strange, dreary dreams of her youth. There had been no pain in them, or
fear, only a sad lassitude, as of one who, beaten and weary, looks back
from a far distance at pain and fear outlived. And lying in her bed,
inert and placid, she felt as if she had been in a great battle, and
that after the annihilation of anaesthetics she had waked to find herself
with limbs gone and wounds bandaged, passive and acquiescent, in a world
from which all large issues had been eliminated for ever.

It was the emptiest kind of life on which her eyes opened so quietly
this morning. She was not even to be life's captive. The little note
which had come to her last night from Franklin and now lay beside her
bed had told her that. He had told her that Althea had taken him back,
and he had only added, 'Thank you, dear Helen, for all that you have
given me and all that you were willing to give.'

In the overpowering sense of sadness that had been the last of the day's
great emotions Helen had found no mitigation of relief for her own
escape. That she had escaped made only an added bitterness. And even
sadness seemed to be a memory this morning, and the relief that came,
profound and almost sweet, was in the sense of having passed away from
feeling. She had felt too much; though, had life been in her with which
to think or feel, she could have wept over Franklin.

Sometimes she closed her eyes, too much at peace for a smile; sometimes
she looked quietly about her familiar little room, above Aunt Grizel's,
and showing from its windows only a view of the sky and of the
chimney-pots opposite, a room oddly empty of associations and links; no
photographs, few books, few pictures; only the vase of flowers she liked
always to have near her; her old Bible and prayer-book and hymnal,
battered by years rather than by use, for religion held no part at all
in Helen's life; and two faded prints of seventeenth-century
battleships, sailing in gallant squadrons on a silvery sea. These had
hung in Helen's schoolroom, and she had always been fond of them. The
room was symbolic of her life, so insignificant in every ou