thing, and she knew her
cousin loved her. Yet Lois had not been able to understand, and Helen
would hear no words of sympathy which were not as much for John as for
herself.

It was not until Thursday that she had told Lois why she had come back.
They were in their pleasant sitting-room, Lois walking restlessly about,
with such puzzled expectation on her face that its white sadness was
almost banished. Helen sat with her hands clasped loosely in her lap, and
leaning her head against the window. Below, there was the bloom and glory
of the garden, butterflies darted through the sunshine, and the air was
full of the honeyed hum of the bees. But the silence of the room seemed
only a breathless anxiety, which forbade rest of mind or body; and so
Helen had roused herself, and tried to tell her cousin what it all meant;
but even as she talked she felt Lois's unspoken condemnation of her
husband, and her voice hardened, and she continued with such apparent
indifference Lois was entirely deceived. "So you see," she ended, "I
cannot go back to Lockhaven."

Lois, walking back and forth, as impatient as her father might have been,
listened, her eyes first filling with tears, and then flashing angrily.
She threw herself on her knees beside Helen, as she finished, and put her
arms about her cousin's waist, kissing her listless hands in a passion of
sympathy. "Oh, my dear!" she cried, her cheeks wet with tears, "how
dreadful--how horrible! Oh, Helen, darling, my poor darling!"

Lois did not stop to consider the theological side of the matter, which
was a relief to Helen. She tried to quiet the young girl's distress,
holding her bright head against her breast, and soothing her with gentle
words.

"If I were you," Lois said at last, "I would go back to Lockhaven; I
would _go_, if it had to be in disguise!"--

"Not if you loved John," Helen answered.

"How can you bear it?" Lois whispered, looking up into the calm face with
a sort of awe which checked her tears. "It is so cruel, Helen, you cannot
forgive him."

"There is nothing to forgive; I hoped you would understand that, Lois.
John cannot do anything else, don't you see? Why, I would not love him as
I do, if, having such convictions, he was not true to them. He must be
true before anything else."

Lois was sitting on the floor in front of her, clasping her knees with
her arms, and rocking back and forth. "Well," she cried hotly, "I don't
understand anything about his convic