s not expecting to gain any
favour by telling me what he knows. Can you not see it is simply to save
you from making the most awful mistake a girl can make in all her life
when she unknowingly marries such a man? Bauer never expects to be a
successful suitor. I do not believe you have any true measure of his
feeling for you. But he is willing to risk anything to spare you misery.
Cannot you see that? What other motive could he have? He is not a rival.
The poor fellow told me frankly that he had given up all hope for
himself. It is pure friendship, and it is so rare and so beautiful a
thing that you cannot afford to trample it down or disbelieve the story
he told me. Helen, if you should let your admiration for money and its
power take such a step as to encourage a man like Van Shaw, it would
break your mother's heart. But worse than that, it would break your own.
Oh, you cannot, you will not do such a thing."

What could Helen say to that? And what less could Esther say to her? Let
the careless mothers in America answer--the mothers who never talk
frankly with their daughters about these things, and the careless
daughters who never take their mothers into their confidence. How many
unhappy marriages would never occur if mothers did their duty and
daughters listened to and heeded the best friend they have on earth.

When Mrs. Douglas had finally fallen asleep, Helen still remained broad
awake. Things had been said in the heart talk that made it impossible
for her to compose herself to sleep. She could no longer doubt the
truthfulness of Bauer or his clear motive, and strange tumult arose in
her thought over the statement her mother had made about his abandonment
of any thought of her as her suitor. The fact that he had expressed such
a sentiment to her mother made Helen a little angry. Why should he give
up all hope so easily--why--what was she thinking? She said to herself
she did not want men to be cowards, but surely Felix Bauer was not a
coward. A man who would go over a cliff like that did not deserve to
have a timid girl like her call him a coward. Only------

And in the midst of all her other feelings she could not altogether shut
out the sight of Van Shaw, broken and bruised as he had lain in agony
there on the seat in the little chapel and she could not, even after all
her mother had said, quite dismiss him from her thought. Her cheek
glowed, as she raised the question in her imagination, of money and its
fasc