our whole life hiding from me; when I saw
you, why, of course, I fell in love at once. O Helen--dear, dear Helen!'

'When you saw my love.'

'Wasn't that seeing you?'

They spoke in whispers, and their hearts were not in their words. He
raised his head and looked at her, and he smiled at her now with the
smile of the beautiful necessity. 'How you've frightened me,' he said.
'Don't be proud. Even if it did need your cleverness to show me that,
too. I mean--you've given me everything--always--and why shouldn't you
have given me the chance to see you--and to know what you are to me? How
you frightened me. You are not proud any longer. You love me.'

She was not proud any longer. She loved him. Vaguely, in the
bewilderment of her strange, her blissful humility, among the great
billows of life that encompassed and lifted her, it seemed with enormous
heart-beats, Helen remembered Franklin's words. 'Let it melt--please let
it melt, dear Helen.' But it had needed the inarticulate, the
instinctive, to pierce to the depths of life. Gerald's tears, his head
so boyishly pressed against her, his arms so childishly clinging, had
told her what her heart might have been dead to for ever if, with
reason and self-command, he had tried to put it into words.

She looked at him, through her tears, and she knew him dearer to her in
this resurrection than if her heart had never died to him; and, as he
smiled at her, she, too, smiled back, tremblingly.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Althea had not seen Gerald after the day that they came up from
Merriston together. The breaking of their engagement was duly announced,
and, with his little note to her, thanking her for her frankness and
wishing her every happiness, Gerald and all things connected with him
seemed to pass out of her life. She saw no more of the frivolous
relations who were really serious, nor of the serious ones who were
really frivolous. She did not even see Helen. Helen's engagement to
Franklin had never been formally announced, and few, beyond her circle
of nearest friends, knew of it; the fact that Franklin had now returned
to his first love was not one that could, at the moment, be made
appropriately public. But, of course, Helen had had to be told, not only
that Franklin had gone from her, but that he had come back to Althea,
and Althea wondered deeply how this news had been imparted. She had not
felt strength to impart it herself. When she asked Franklin, very
tentativel