dity is any excuse. I ought to have felt he
couldn't be near you like that, and not love you. I robbed him of you,
didn't I? If it hadn't been for what I did, you would have married him,
all the same--in spite of what you told me, I mean.'

Helen had coloured a little, and after a pause in which she thought over
his words she said: 'Yes, of course I would have married him all the
same. But it was really I, in what I told you, who brought it upon
myself and upon Franklin.'

For a little while there was silence and then Gerald said, delicately,
yet with a directness that showed he took for granted in her a detached
candour equal to his own: 'I think I asked it stupidly. I suppose the
thing I can't even yet realise is that, in a way, I robbed you too. I've
robbed you of everything, haven't I, Helen?'

'Not of everything,' said Helen, glad really of the small consolation
she could offer him. 'Not of financial safety, as it happens. It will
make you less unhappy to hear, so I must tell you, Franklin is arranging
things with Aunt Grizel so that when she dies I shall come into quite a
nice little bit of money. I shall have no more sordid worries. In that
way you mustn't have me on your conscience.'

Gerald's eyes were on her and they took in this fact of her safety with
no commotion; it was but one--and a lesser--among the many strange facts
he had had to take in. And he forced himself to look squarely at what he
had conceived to be the final impossibility as he asked: 'And--in other
ways?--Could you have fallen in love with him, Helen?'

It was so bad, so inconceivably bad a thing to face, that his relief
was like a joy when Helen answered. 'No, I could never have fallen in
love with dear Franklin. But I cared for him very much, the more, no
doubt, from having ceased to care about love. I felt that he was the
best person, the truest, the dearest, I had ever known, and that we
would make a success of our life together.'

'Yes, yes, of course,' Gerald hastened past her qualifications to the
one liberating fact. 'Two people like you would have had to. But you
didn't love him; you couldn't have come to love him. I haven't robbed
you of a man you could have loved.'

She saw his immense relief. The joy of it was in his eyes and voice; and
the thought of Franklin, of what she had not been able to do for
Franklin, made it bitter to her that because she had not been able to
save Franklin, Gerald should find relief.

'You coul