ied young heart,
that filled Helen with astonished bliss. She was tamed at last to the
extent of laughing with Gerald at herself; and, though the force of her
nature led him, the sweetness of his nature controlled her. They became
the dearest of friends.

Yes, so it had always been; so it had always looked--to all the rest of
the world, and to Gerald. Helen, lying on her divan, saw the pictures of
comradeship filling the years. It was her consciousness of what the real
meaning of the pictures was that supplied something else, something
hidden and desperate that pulsed in them all. How she remembered the
first time that she had drawn away when Gerald kissed her, putting up
between them the shield of a lightly yet decisively accepted
conventionality. They were 'growing up'; this was her justification. How
she remembered what it had cost her to keep up the lightness of her
smile so that he should not guess what lay beneath. Her nature was all
passion, and enclosing this passion, like a steady hand held round a
flame, was a fierce purity, a fierce pride. Gerald had never guessed. No
one had ever guessed. It seemed to Helen that the pain of it had broken
her heart in the very spring of her years; that it was only a maimed and
cautious creature that the world had ever known.

She lay, and drew long quiet breaths in looking at it all. The day of
reawakened memories had been like a sword in her heart, and now she
seemed to draw it out slowly, and let the blood come with a sense of
peace. She could even, as often, lend to the contemplation of her
tragedy the bitter little grimace of mockery with which she met so much
of life. She could tell herself, as often, that she had never outgrown
love-sick girlhood, and that she was merely in love with Gerald's smile.
Yet Gerald was all in his smile; and Gerald, it seemed, was made to be
loved, all of him, helplessly and hopelessly, by unfortunate her. She
felt her love as a misfortune; it was too strong and too unsatisfied to
be felt in any sense as joy, though it strung her nature to a painful
appreciation of joy. She saw life with a cold, appraising eye; it was
like a landscape robbed of all sunlight, and, so robbed, so bleak, and
so bereft, it was easy to appraise it, to see, since one could have no
warmth or light, what were the next best things to have. She had missed
the next best things again and again, when the moment had come for
taking them; she had drawn back sick, blanched,