CHAPTER V.

AN EXPLANATION.

Helen Griswold laid down her pen; placed the sheet of paper which she had just covered with her neat writing in a drawer of her davenport; ranged her natty desk implements, and then, resting her chin in the palms of her hands and looking wistfully before her, she fell a-thinking. Was the sense of her husband's absence growing real and painful? Had the effort of this unwonted method of communication with him roused her to a realisation of the great change that had fallen upon her daily life? Perhaps so. But there was more perplexity than pain in Helen's face, and Griswold's departure, though painful, was in no way perplexing. There was something lurking in her mind to-day--there had been something lurking in her mind yesterday--which she dreaded to call out and gaze upon in the open light.

After a little she rose restlessly, and with an impatient sigh, and passed into the adjoining room, where she found her infant just awake, and was soon absorbed in the pleasant duties and interest of her nursery. Then came a walk with the child and its nurse, and Helen reëntered her house, feeling composed and cheerful, and full of good resolutions for the wise disposition of her time during her husband's absence; a disposition by which she almost unconsciously provided for the elimination of the one disturbing depressing element.

She had just reached her room and was laying aside her bonnet when the servant brought a message from Mr. Warren. That gentleman requested that he might be admitted to her presence, and said that he had come upon special business from Mr. Griswold.

'He knows how to make me receive him,' Helen thought bitterly; and her eyes flashed and her brows contracted. 'He knows I cannot let the maid take a refusal to such a plea as that.'

'Tell Mr. Warren I will be with him in a few minutes,' she said; and went on mechanically arranging her dress.

As she was fastening her linen cuffs, she was reminded of the trifling incident of the finding of the sleeve-link, and it occurred to her that the ornament in question belonged to Trenton Warren. Surely it was a carved gem; one of a pair which she had seen him wear, respectively representing the heads of Hebe and Ganymede. She was glad to have recollected this circumstance; it would give her something indifferent, something safe, to talk about. She looked about for the link; she had taken it out of her pocket the night before, and laid it down on her dressing-table. It was not there. She called her maid, and asked her if she had noticed a gentleman's sleeve-link in the ring-tray. Her maid replied that she had seen it, and supposing it to belong to Mr. Griswold, she had slipped it into his dressing-bag just before he closed it. Mrs. Griswold remarked carelessly that it was rather provoking, that the sleeve-link was not Mr. Griswold's, but that it could not be helped, and it did not matter.

She lingered, unwilling to go down, and hoping, when at length she could not defer doing so any longer, that as soon as Mr. Warren should have informed her of the nature of the business, real or pretended, on which he had come, some other visitor might arrive and interrupt the _tête-à-tête_, which was extremely disagreeable to her in prospect and most ill-timed.

It was impossible longer to loiter, and Mrs. Griswold went down-stairs, her long dress trailing, her small head rather disdainfully held up and back, her countenance wearing an expression which all her customary associates, save one, would have regarded with surprise. In the presence of that one, whose ear had caught her first footfall upon the thickly-carpeted stairs, she stood in a few moments and his glance caught the unfamiliar expression and read it aright--without, indeed, its inmost meaning, its complications of origin, but still clearly enough.

Trenton Warren was standing in the same place from whence he had watched her so closely on the night which had so severely taxed his self-command and her patience.

He was handsomely dressed in his usual accurate unexaggerated style, in a light gray morning suit, and he had an air of perfect leisure about him, simple leisure which was not without its charm.

It was the kind of manner which pleases women who live in a business atmosphere, among men who are generally either occupied or over-tired; it said so intelligibly, 'Here I am entirely devoted to your service, having got everything off my mind but yourself.'

As all the women of his acquaintance knew Trenton Warren to be as busy a man as his fellows, the compliment was real, and so the manner was effective. He was decidedly liked by women; perhaps the solitary exception to that rule was the one woman for whom he wore this manner most elaborately, most watchfully, most invariably. But Helen Griswold did not like even the air of leisure which was so captivating to other women. It had the misfortune to link itself to the one drawback, the one discomfort, the one injury of her life, and so, woman-like, she distorted its meaning, she refused its tribute.

He, too, she bitterly thought, had the presumption to regard her as an ornament, as a being incompetent to fill a serious and sympathetic place in her husband's life; he, too, held that women should be excused from business, and so he came to her a totally unreal creature, a drawing-room lounger, with malice in his quiet smile and insulting depreciation under his deferential address, and the acquiescence in her uselessness which encouraged Alston in his one fault, and made her heart sick with a powerless anger, to which her unerring woman's instinct, as she called it--the least trustworthy guide any woman can follow except within a very limited track--assured her that Trenton Warren was perfectly conscious.

He had never found her in a less conciliatory humour than on the present occasion. The undefined struggle in her own heart, the signs that a great change was passing over her, the introspection which had been so entirely foreign to her mind and habits, the little lingering bitterness which had mingled with the solemn tenderness of a parting with Alston, imparted into it by her feeling that she in reality knew nothing about the purpose and details of the business which was taking him so far away from her for so long; all this had prepared her to receive his visit with anything but welcome. And as he looked at her he knew that, too, and she saw that he knew it.

Helen Griswold was not sufficiently a woman of the world to be mistress of those fine shades of manners which are such powerful weapons on the woman's side of social warfare; but she conveyed to Trenton Warren with quite sufficient accuracy a sense that she expected him to deliver his message and go, before they had exchanged two sentences. She did not take her customary seat, but placed herself on an ordinary chair in an attitude which had a provoking coolness about it; and she looked over, not at Trenton.

He had seen her husband later than she had; her husband's parting words had been for him; would she not display some curiosity as to the final interview--some interest? Not she; not a jot! So he made up his mind at once that he would not use any _ménagements_ with her, but show her at once and plainly the position in which 'that enviable ass, Griswold'--for thus Mr. Trenton Warren called his confiding absent friend in his thoughts--had placed her.

'You have some business to be communicated to my husband, I believe?' said poor Helen, with her very best imitation of slightly patronising unconcern.

'O dear, no,' replied Warren, putting his hand into his breast-pocket and taking out a letter. 'I have no business to communicate _to_ Mr. Griswold; my commission is _from_ him.'

`To me?' The colour flushed over her face.

'To you,' he answered with a bow, and then went on without looking at her, his eyes bent on the letter in his hand. 'You are aware that I met Mr. Griswold at the steamer. He had some last words to say to me--last words which gratified me very much, Mrs. Griswold, because they proved the sincerity and genuineness of his confidence in me; he intrusted me with--'

'That letter, which I can see from here is addressed to me. Please to give it to me sir!'

He glanced at her very slightly, smiled also very slightly, and laid the letter on the table, by her side. She had not made the least gesture like taking it from his hand.

'I thank you,' she said, but did not take up the letter. 'I thought my husband had given me his final instructions; but perhaps he had forgotten something. I am sorry you should have had the trouble of coming during business hours.' Then with a total change of tone, 'I think you lost a sleeve-link here the other evening, which I picked up; but most unfortunately it has--'

'Excuse me, Mrs. Griswold,' said Warren, in a firm tone, 'if in my turn I interrupt you. I have something to say, and I do not wish to turn to irrelevant matter's until it has been said. I did not come here merely to bring you a letter, which I might have sent you by a messenger; I came here for a more serious purpose, which may or may not be corroborated by Mr. Griswold's letter--I know nothing of its contents--to tell you that your husband has intrusted you to my care, and wished you to refer to me in his absence in any case in which you might experience difficulty or require advice.'

So far Helen had heard him with varying colour and a beating heart, half choked with anger and an undefined dread but now she rose, and laying her hand upon the letter, said, in an unsteady voice, 'Your communication is an extraordinary one, Mr. Warren. I think--I think you can hardly expect me to say that it is welcome. I would rather read my husband's letter before I hear more.'

'You wish me to leave you?' asked Warren, who had risen when she rose, but made no sign of an intention to go away.

'I do.'

'I cannot obey you, Mrs. Griswold. Let me beg that you will resume your seat and listen to me. I am an unwelcome visitor, I know, and you take my communication badly for some reason which I do not understand, but which I hope to surmount.'

He controlled himself perfectly; his tone was quite deferential, and not the faintest, most flickering smile passed over his face.

She had slowly reseated herself, and sat holding the letter and looking at him with a fixed frown.

'Griswold felt this parting, in more than its sentimental aspect, very seriously--he thought of your position gravely, and of your inexperience and habitual dependence upon him for guidance. He deputed me, as his most intimate friend--indeed, the only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the business which has taken him to England--to act for him in several affairs here--things with which I need not trouble you--and to take care of you and baby; I use his own words. In the first place, I must apprise you that all your letters to your husband--the charming daily record which you have promised him' (Helen started and winced with pain. That her husband should have talked so familiarly of her with any man--with this man of all men!)--'must reach him through me.'

'Through you? I do not understand what you mean.'

'Then I will make my meaning plainer. Every letter which you write to your husband must be sent to my office, under cover to me, to be forwarded from thence. Such are Griswold's explicit directions. Please to look at this memorandum.'

He laid a leaf, torn from a note-book, before her; it bore these words:

'_All letters written to me by my wile, or sent to my private address to be forwarded, are to be sent under cover to Trenton Warren to his office, when he will dispatch them to me_.'

'ALSTON GRISWOLD.'

'I see,' said Helen, 'that your statement is correct, that Mr. Griswold has made this extraordinary arrangement, and that, much as I dislike it I am bound to conform to it. But you, Mr. Warren, _you_ are bound to explain it. Have the goodness to do so.'

'Ah, ha!' he replied, with a shrug of the shoulders, full of impertinent depreciation to her angered eyes; 'that, I regret to say, it is not in my power to do!'

'What, do you pretend that after your last words with my husband, after undertaking the charge he laid upon you, after bringing me this letter and this memorandum, you do not know why Mr. Griswold made such an arrangement?'

'Pardon me, I do not pretend, I do not say, anything of the sort. I am perfectly well aware of the motive which led to Mr. Griswold's making the arrangement which is unpleasant to you, but which I am constrained to commend as a wise and proper one. I merely say that I regret that it is not in my power to inform you of his reasons.'

'You refuse to tell me; you acknowledge that you are in my husband's confidence more completely than I am--you tell me so in fact, commending his unexplained directions to me--and you expect me to tolerate all this. For what do you take me, Mr. Warren?'

The struggle in Helen's mind and feelings while she spoke these brave-sounding words was severe. Under the smooth leisurely manner of Warren there was an ill-disguised consciousness of power which frightened her, and there was that nameless something that had already been haunting her. She was not exactly a courageous, but she was a singularly sincere woman, and there is always more or less bravery in truthful actions. She made a sudden resolution even while her blood was cold, as she asked the question of herself: 'Has Alston put himself in this man's power?' She would quarrel with Warren _à l'outrance_ then and there. She would put an end to this evil influence in her life; it should haunt her no longer. She would justify herself to Alston if he blamed her by confiding in him, as she had not yet done by telling him, the inmost dread of her heart. If he treated it as a folly, she would say let it be a folly in his eyes, _let it be a folly of hers_, which she should look to him to respect. A full presentiment and an intimation which she truly and fully believed (there was a dash of superstition about Helen Griswold)--with which women with more mind than any one who has taken the trouble to develop, and an unconsciously unsatisfied heart one occasionally possessed--told her that in an utter breach with this man, a determined stand against him, lay her only safety. She would make the utter breach now on the spot; she would take a determined stand.

With the wonderful quickness of thought, all this passed through her mind, and her resolution was taken before Trenton Warren answered her angry question, which he did with considerable deliberation. He too, had been making a resolution; he, too recognised this interview as a crisis in his relations with this woman--this woman so beautiful in his sight, so captivating, so far removed--unless, indeed, his skill and daring, his 'good play,' as he called it ii his inmost thoughts, chanced to bring her near. The events of that morning had curtailed. the space between them in an unexpected, unlooked-for manner. And he entirely misinterpreted the irrepressible symptoms of emotion in Helen's manner. He saw hat, with all her braving out of the position she was afraid of him; and, as he judged her only from the shallow depths of his own consciousness, as one who did not love her husband with passion, and therefore did not love him at all, it never occurred to him that she feared him for her husband's sake--he sought and found a meaner motive for her fear. Why should she fear him? Why should she shrink from the notion of his influence with the husband she assuredly did not love, if she were unconscious that he had not an influence over herself which she dreaded? Fear comes not of indifference, nor is one with disdain! The hope which he had secretly cherished in his treacherous breast in a smouldering state for months past sprang up into a flame under the influence of Helen's misinterpreted anger. The mental process in his case was as swift as in hers, and it was after only a brief pause between question and answer that he replied to her.

'I refuse to tell you, Mrs. Griswold. It is impossible that I should violate your husband's injunctions on this point, and I hasten to reply to your other question. I do expect you to tolerate my conduct, because you _must_ recognise that honour dictates it, though you may not understand what it costs me; and I take you for the best of wives and the most fascinating of women.'

He approached her as he spoke with his hand held out, and a smile upon his face which drove the last faint scruples of prudence far from the exasperated woman whom he had so thoroughly roused; but Helen rolled her chair some feet back upon the castors, and, with a slight wave of her hand, rejected his. Very beautiful she looked--more beautiful than he had ever seen her--her great eyes ablaze, so that they shone like jewels, as she said:

'And _I_ take _you_ for the falsest of men. You have always been my enemy, and I have always known it--known it so long and so well, felt it so constantly, that it is a relief to me to tell you so. Keep this secret from me! Do you think Alston will keep it, when I ask him to explain it to me? No; you know he will not, though you would have made me despise and distrust him, if you could. Yes, you would, and you tried, tried hard, for some purpose of your own--I do not know and I do not care for what purpose--to divide us utterly. You succeeded in part--thank God, only in part did you succeed! Alston would have made me his friend and confidant only for you. But you made him contemptuous of my intelligence; you persuaded him that women are unsafe in matters of business; you divided me from one-half my husband's life, and made it a mystery to me. But for you I should have been his companion in everything. I tell you, Mr. Warren, I distrusted you from the first. I saw you had an influence which you were using ill, I--'

'You did me the honour and yourself the injury of being jealous of me, Mrs. Griswold. It is a mistake which young wives are apt to make with respect to their husbands' friends, and one which frequently costs them a good deal.'

'I was not jealous of you,' she said indignantly. 'I could not entertain so base a feeling. Why should not Alston have friends, as many and as close as he pleased? But you were his enemy--not his friend; because you were my enemy; because you would have degraded me if you could--yes, degraded me, I repeat--by making my husband treat me as a toy or an indulged pet, not as an equal associate.'

'You are simply doing him a monstrous injustice,' said Warren, with a sudden abatement of sarcasm in his tone and manner, and a not unsuccessful assumption of hurt-feeling, of deferential explanatoriness; 'you are imputing that which is in the nature of the man to an external influence. Griswold is a very good fellow, and my best friend; but his notions of women, all his theories about them, differ from mine widely. He believes in the intellectual inferiority of women as he believes in their physical beauty, and likes it as much. Long before he married you, he told me a clever woman was, to his mind, an anomaly, and a clever wife a nuisance; that he did not believe any woman in the world could understand business or hold her tongue; and he meant to conduct his domestic relations, if he ever found any, on Hotspur's theory, and, while giving his wife all due credit for discretion, making sure that she "would not tell that which she did not know." This root of bitterness was none of my planting, nor have I watered it. You have spoken with harsh frankness to me, Mrs. Griswold; let me speak with frankness that shall not be harsh to you. I have contemplated your domestic life with pain--'

'Indeed, and why? It is an unenviable one.'

'So you believe, because you have little experience and an unawakened heart. If you only knew what home might be, and love, the love of a man to whom you would be more than the fairest of women, the dearest of friends, the most trusted of counsellors, the sharer of every feeling, the companion of every thought! Would not that be the ideal of earthly happiness?'

His voice had become low, tender, and persuasive, and his words had a strange influence on Helen. She seemed to forget _him_, to be conscious of them only, to have been sent by them into a dream.

'Happiness more than earthly,' she said, as if to herself, hardly knowing that she spoke.

'Such happiness might have been yours. Be honest, be patient, be true with yourself and with me, and you must acknowledge that it could never have come with your marriage with Griswold. He is the best of fellows, but it is not in him to appreciate you. You are a woman for a man to love with his whole mind and with all the strength of his pride. If fate had made you _my_ wife you would have been so loved.'

He moved a step nearer to her, and stepped before her, looking at her with eyes whose gaze she dared not meet.

'You may as well hear me out,' he went on, with a tremor in his voice; 'since your ill-placed suspicions have forced me to clear myself from the charge which you have brought against me, it is fair that you should listen to me. When you believed that I was estranging Griswold from you, undervaluing you to him, I was tortured with envy of his lot, and silent about you because I dared not speak to my friend of his wife lest he should--slow as his mind is, except when business is concerned--suspect that I loved her.'

'You are a wicked man,' cried Helen, rising from her chair and speaking almost inarticulately in a passion of rage, shame, and fear. The undefined thing which had been haunting her, the shadow with which she had refused to parley, the shapeless dread which had troubled the last hours of her husband's presence in his home, the phantom that had stolen to her side when she was recording the blameless thoughts of her innocent heart, had assumed form, consistency, and spoke to her with a human voice and undissembled speech. This, then, was what it had all meant, and the thing which she had feared had come upon her in a shape worse than her fears. It was this man's prejudice, continued dislike, that she had fancied were in the atmosphere of her home, tainting it, and filtering drops of poison into her cup of life; but now she found it was his love, his deadly, hateful, treacherous, dastardly love. Good God! How she loathed and feared him, for her husband had gone away and left her in this man's power. Without his aid she could not even communicate with him, and he--and he, he was free to write whatsoever he pleased to Alston. It said much for Helen's courage and principle that she never dreamt, in the moment when all this was fresh and clear and terrible before her, of any compromise. She would keep this man at defiance, she would brave him.

'You are a wicked man,' she said, 'a traitor to your friend, and a coward to me; you take a dastardly advantage of my unprotected position, and the blind confidence which my husband places in you, and you insult me in my solitude. Leave my house, sir, and send me at once my husband's address in England. I refuse to transmit my letters through you. I repudiate all acquaintance with you henceforth from this hour; and if you attempt to presume upon the mistake Alston has made, I shall inform him word for word of what has occurred today. Let me pass, sir, or I will ring for my servants!'

Warren bad interrupted her on her way to the door, and was standing before it, his hand behind his back pressed upon the upper panel.

'She did not say she would tell him _whether or no_,' was his rapid reflection, and there was a gush of guilty hope in the thought, for this man believed women to be virtuous only in the degree in which also they were fools, and he held Helen to be no fool.

'I entreat you to pause,' he said gently, 'before you make a scandal in the house. I am resolved to speak to you, and nothing short of your making such a scandal can deter me. I have offended you by telling you the truth, only a little more deeply than you were previously offended. I am very unfortunate, but I have justified myself, and I repeat it; I love you--I love you as I have never even persuaded myself that I loved any other woman! I ask nothing--I seek nothing from you but the toleration of a sentiment which does you no dishonour, which is stronger than my will, for your husband's sake and your own.'

'And I tell you,' she cried, wild and reckless with anger, 'that I will not tolerate it, either for my husband's sake or my own, for it _does_ me dishonour. It may be, as you say, that mine is an unawakened heart, but my conscience is unused to slumber' (in after days she remembered this fatal admission, and raged blindly and in vain against the impulse which had induced her to make it), 'and now I am not going to make any scandal, I am not going to endeavour to pass that door until you think fit to stand aside and no longer use virtual violence to me in my own house. See, I resume my seat; I shall retain it until you rid me of your presence; and I tell you quite plainly my determination. I demand of you my husband's address in England, and if you refuse to give it, I think it fair to warn you that I shall follow him to London by the next steamer; and once there, I shall have no difficulty in finding him.'

At the words 'I shall follow him,' Trenton Warren had started and left the door. He now turned abruptly to one of the windows, and stood there looking out, his face set and pale, for a full minute after she had concluded her slowly-delivered sentence.

When he turned to speak to her, she marked the whiteness of his face, and believed her threat had frightened him.

'I _cannot_ give you your husband's address,' he said. 'I can write to him, and telling him that you are dissatisfied--as doubtless your own letters will convey--advise him to intrust you with the truth concerning his business in London in every respect. But no matter what you threaten, or what you do, I cannot, I will not, depart from his wishes in this matter.'

He slowly approached her, but did not pass round the table which stood between them; then suddenly seated himself, and studiously averting his eyes from her--indeed, Helen Griswold never caught his glance again during the remainder of the interview--he went on speaking in a dogged tone.

'I have made a blunder, Mrs. Griswold, and made a fool of myself! I cannot unsay what I have said, for it is true; the explanation of all the past which has offended you is the offence of the present. I have loved you, but I may cease to love you by an effort. A man does not go on loving with any kind of love very long if he is quite without hope; _and I am quite without hope_.'

The emphasis on these words would have conveyed a warning to the ear of a practised woman of the world; to Helen they conveyed merely an assurance, a relief, a mitigation of insult.

'Suppose,' he continued, 'we discuss the matter reasonably, not so much in your interest or in mine, as in that of Griswold, your husband and my friend?'

'Your friend?'

'Yes, my friend. Women like you insist upon pushing everything to its extreme verge; because I am not the soul of honour, I must be a mere villain; because I love you, I must, in every other sense and way, be false to my friendship with your husband--a weak notion, a shallow judgment! Accept my assurance that you are mistaken, and let me go on. A total breach between us will only make Alston suspicious and unhappy, and, perhaps, morose. He is the sort of man to suspect that a cool man like me does not make love to a married woman without something like encouragement; another case of a weak notion and a shallow judgment. But I will relieve you of my presence. I will abandon the charge laid upon me by Griswold, which you so much resent, and he may never know it, until time shall have changed everything, enabled me to meet you with indifference, which has hitherto been impossible, and you to conquer your repugnance.'

In the evenness of his speech there was something artificial, which might have warned her had the temptation to snatch at the relief in his words been one whit less strong. But she heard no warning, only a blessed promise; only an indication that the cloud which had fallen upon her might be made to pass away, and leave a better and surer brightness than ever behind it.

'I will forgive, I will forget everything,' she said eagerly, and with a bright and beautiful blush, 'if you will go away and leave me; if you will never attempt to see me during Alston's absence. If I may be quite sure of that, and calculate upon it, I will never mention anything to him. It would be an awful pain to me to do so; it is an immense relief that you do not force me to tell it. I will send my letters through you; I will ask you no question, if you will promise me, when you pass that door to-day, I shall see you no more until Alston has returned!'

'And I have come to my senses. The terms are hard, but I accept them. Only you forget, Mrs. Griswold, that you are exacting a very difficult thing from me; the relinquishment of my business, the placing it in the hands of other people, for at least the same term as that of Griswold's absence.'

'Why, would you leave New York?'

'How could I remain in New York and never come here, break through all my former habits, and neglect every recognition of Griswold, without being suspected of a motive; and from the suspicion of a motive to the discovery of its nature the interval is very, very short. No, I must leave New York, where lots of men know how I stand with Griswold, and have been seriously supposed to stand with you. I will do so; but in your turn you must promise me, in addition to your forgiveness, absolute silence towards Griswold.'

'Of course,' said Helen impatiently. 'I only care that he may never have the pain of knowing.'

'You mistake me again. I do not allude to that, but to my absence from New York. Men are too busy, and we signify too little to one another, for any risk to arise, or any one comparing notes with Griswold, when he comes back, about how long I have been away. But he must not be allowed to think that, for the sake of a mere pleasure trip--I should go to the Western States--I abandoned the charge he laid upon me, and broke the promise I made him at the last moment.'

'You are scrupulous enough in small matters,' thought Helen; but she only assented aloud again, impatiently.

'Then I have your promise, Mrs. Griswold, your positive assurance, that your letters to your husband shall contain no intimation whatever of my absence from New York?'

'They shall contain no mention of you whatever.'

'Pardon me, that will not do. Your correspondence with your husband is to be in journal form--you are right, it was not very delicate in him to tell any one anything of the kind--'

'I did not speak, sir.'

'True, there was no need of speech; but that journal, if it contains no mention of me, will be very unlike what Griswold expects.'

'I cannot help that. I can suppress all mention of you, but I cannot write letters about you, if that is the meaning you are aiming at. But you need not hesitate for that consideration. I shall merely have to remind my husband that we never agreed about you, and to say that I avoided on purpose the disagreeable subject.'

A momentary gleam of fury shot across Warren's face; but he suppressed it, and made her a slightly artificial bow.

'This is agreed to, then,' he said; 'and so this interview, which had so stormy a beginning, ends peaceably. I am utterly beaten, Mrs. Griswold, acknowledging my defeat, and accepting the penalty. You will see me no more during Griswold's absence, and when we next meet the old things will have passed away.'

He bowed deeply and slowly, and walked out of the room with a quiet deliberate step; but there was something in his air, in his attitude, in his smile, as little like a beaten man as could be. When he had left the house--she waited, listening for the closing of the street-door--Helen Griswold lay back in her chair, and wept such bitter tears of anger, humiliation, and loneliness as her eyes had never before shed.

This terrible interview had terminated much better than she could have hoped. She had got rid of Warren, who would be powerless for the future to harm her, and she had avoided the necessity for wounding her husband. When he returned, she not only hoped that foreign travel and new acquaintances would have weaned him from his infatuation for Warren, but supplied him with a sounder standard whereby to measure his claim to regard. But where was the triumph which she ought to have felt at such a solution of the difficulty which had beset and harassed her whole married life? No signs of triumph came to the overwrought feelings and tired nerves; on the contrary, a strange kind of terror, depression, and misery settled down upon her, the more irresistible as she endeavoured to disentangle and sort the incidents of the interview which had just taken place. Her woman's instinct really aroused, and not wrong for once, told her the victory had been too easily won.

* * * * * *

'So there is an end of my journal,' wrote Helen the same night, when she was the only person awake under the roof. 'All my pretty and pleasant plans of setting down the inmost feelings of my heart, of recording them and every incident of the growth of my mind for Alston's eyes to see, are quite at an end. There is a secret in my life now which he must never know, and a dread within my breast which I cannot say to him that he might soothe it. How wretched they make me! how I detest them! Good heavens, how miserable one may be with everything beside one's-self to make one happy! I read over and over again the few pages I wrote this morning, and I ask myself, Can it be that I wrote them, and that since then I have learned so much of life, seen so much of human nature? That such treachery should exist as Trenton Warren's; that such credulity should exist as Alston's; that such blindness could be as mine! Thank God he has really promised to go away. I shall hardly breathe until he has gone, and I shall never stir beyond the door. He said he would go at once. How _am_ I to write to Alston? The journal plan I must abandon; I feel that would now be impossible. I must only just do one common every-day letter. Alston will not like it--he will reckon it as only one of my compromises. No matter; it is a convenient excuse for faults far worse even than I have ever committed.'