aze at her for another moment before, pressing it, she let it fall
and said: 'Of course you couldn't go on.'

Helen was as resolved--Althea saw that clearly--to act her part of
unresentful kindness as she to act hers of innocent remorse. And the
swordthrust in the sight was to suspect that had Helen been in reality
the dispossessed and not the secretly triumphant, she might have been as
kind and as unresentful.

'It's all been a dreadful mistake,' Althea said, going to a chair and
loosening her furs. 'From the very beginning I felt doubt. From the very
beginning I felt that Gerald and I did not really make each other happy.
And I believe that you wondered about it too.'

Helen had resumed her seat at the writing-table, sitting turned from it,
her hand hanging over the back of the chair, her long legs crossed, and
she faced her friend with that bright yet softened gaze, interested,
alert, but too benign, too contented, to search or question closely. She
was evidently quite willing that Althea should think what she chose,
and, this was becoming evident, she intended to help her to think it. So
after a little pause she answered, 'I did wonder, rather; it didn't seem
to me that you and Gerald were really suited.'

'And you felt, didn't you,' Althea urged, 'that it was only because I
had been so blind, and had not seen where my heart really was, you know,
that your engagement was possible? I was so afraid you'd think we'd been
faithless to you--Franklin and I; but, when I stopped being blind----'

'Of course,' Helen helped her on, nodding and smiling gravely, 'of
course you took him back. I don't think you were either of you
faithless, and you mustn't have me a bit on your minds; it was
startling, of course; but I'm not heart-broken,' Helen assured her.

Oh, there was no malice here; it was something far worse to bear, this
wish to lift every shadow and smooth every path. Althea's eyes fixed
themselves hard on her friend. Her head swam a little and some of her
sustaining lucidity left her.

'I was so afraid,' she said, 'that you, perhaps, cared for Franklin--had
come to care so much, I mean--that it might have been hard for you to
forgive. I can't tell you the relief it is----'

'To see that I didn't care so much as that?' Helen smiled brightly,
though with a brightness, now, slightly wary, as though with all her
efforts to slide and not to press, she felt the ice cracking a little
under her feet, and as though some