throbbing temples. Was she mad! Mad! Was it for this that she had
forced herself to give him the opportunity to speak to-night, when her
motive was so different, when it had seemed the only _right_ thing left
for her to do!

And now, still holding her temples, she raised her eyes to Thornton--he
had stepped back like a man stricken, his hands dropped to his sides.

"I--we are mad!" she whispered.

"Helena!" he said in a numbed way; and again; "Helena!" Then, with an
effort to control his voice: "You--you do not care--you do not love me?"

"No," she said--and thereafter for a long time a silence held between
them.

Then Thornton spoke.

"Some day perhaps, Helena," he said, "you could learn to love me--for I
would teach you. Perhaps now you feel that your whole duty lies here in
this work to which you have so unselfishly given your life; but I would
not hinder that, only try to help as best I could. Perhaps I have been
abrupt, have spoken too soon--it is only a few weeks since I saw you
first, but it seems as though in those few weeks I had come to know you
as if I had known you all my life and--"

But now she interrupted him, shaking her head in a sad little fashion.

"You do not know me," she said. "Sometimes I think I do not know myself.
Think! You do not know where I came from to join the Patriarch here; you
have no single shred of knowledge about me; you do not know a single
particular of my life before you knew me."

"I do not need to know," he answered gravely. "You are as genuine as
pure gold is genuine--it is in your voice, your smile, your eyes. It is
a crude simile perhaps, but one never asks where the pure gold was
dug--it stands for itself, for what it is, because it is what it
is--pure gold--at its face value."

The words seemed to stab at Helena, condemning, accusing; and yet, too,
in a strange, vague way, they seemed to bring her a hope, a promise for
the days to come--at face value! If she could live hereafter--at face
value!

"Listen," she said, and her voice was very low. "I do not know how to
say what I must say to you. Last night I knew that--that you loved me. I
had not thought of you like that, in that way, until then, or--or I
should have tried never to have let this hurt come to you. But last
night I knew, and since then I have known that sooner or later you
would--would tell me of it." She stopped for an instant--her eyes full
of tears now. "And so," she went on presently, "I have l