dn't have robbed me of him if there'd been any chance of that,'
she said. 'If there had been any chance of my loving Franklin I would
never have let him go. Don't be glad, don't show me that you are
glad--because I didn't love him.'

'I can't help being glad, Helen,' he said.

She leaned her head on her hand, covering her eyes. While he was there,
showing her that he was glad because she had not loved Franklin, she
could not be kind, nor even just to him.

'Helen,' he said, 'I know what you are feeling; but will you listen to
me?' She answered that she would listen to anything he had to say, and
her voice had the leaden tone of impersonal charity.

'Helen,' Gerald said, 'I know how I've blundered. I see everything. But,
with it all, seeing it all, I don't think that you are fair to me. I
don't think it is fair if you can't see that I couldn't have thought of
all these other possibilities--after what you'd told me--the other day.
How could I think of anything, then, but the one thing--that you loved
me and that I loved you, and that, of course, I must set my mistake
right at once, set Althea free and come to you? I was very simple and
very stupid; but I don't think it's fair not to see that I couldn't
believe you'd really repulse me, finally, if you loved me.'

'You ought to have believed it,' Helen said, still with her covered
eyes. 'That is what is most simple, most stupid in you. You ought to
have felt--and you ought to feel now--that to a woman who could tell you
what I did, everything is over.'

'But, Helen, that's my point,' ever so carefully and patiently he
insisted. 'How can it be over when I love you--if you still love me?'

She put down her hand now and looked up at him and she saw his hope; not
yet dead; sick, wounded, perplexed, but, in his care and patience,
vigilant. And it was with a sad wonder for the truth of her own words,
that she said, looking up at the face dear beyond all telling for so
many years, 'I don't want you, Gerald. I don't want your love. I'm not
blaming you. I am fair to you. I see that you couldn't help it, and that
it was my fault really. But you are asking for something that isn't
there any longer.'

'You mean,' said Gerald, he was very pale, 'that I've won no rights; you
don't want a man who has won no rights.'

'There are no rights to win, Gerald.'

'Because of what I've done to him?'

'Perhaps; but I don't think it's that.'

'Because of what I've done to you--not seei