'Yes,' said Gerald, 'and she won't have me.' 'But Miss Jakes?' said Miss Grizel. 'She is in love with Kane, and Kane with her--as he always has been, you know. They are all right. Everything is all right, except Helen.' A queer illumination began to shoot across Miss Grizel's stupor. 'Perhaps you told Helen that you loved her before Miss Jakes threw you over. Perhaps you told Mr. Kane that Miss Jakes loved him before she threw you over. Perhaps it's you who have upset the apple-cart.' 'I suppose it is,' said Gerald, gloomily, but without contrition. 'I thought it would bring things right to have the facts out. It has brought them right--for Althea and Kane; they will be perfectly happy together.' This simplicity, in the face of her own deep knowledge--the knowledge she had built on in sending for Franklin Kane a week ago--roused a ruthless ire in Miss Grizel. 'I'm afraid that you've let your own wishes sadly deceive you,' she said. 'I must tell you, since you evidently don't know it, that Mr. Kane is in love with Helen; deeply in love with her. From what I understand of the situation you have sacrificed him to your own feeling, and perhaps sacrificed Miss Jakes too; but I don't go into that.' It was now Gerald's turn to gaze and gasp; he did not gasp, however; he only gazed--gazed with a gaze no longer inward and unseeing. He was, at last, seeing everything. He fell back on the one most evident thing he saw, and had from the beginning seen. 'But Helen--she could never have loved him. Such a marriage would be unfit for Helen. I'm not excusing myself. I see I've been an unpardonable fool in one way.' Miss Grizel's ire increased. 'Unfit for Helen? Why, pray? He would have given her the position of a princess--in our funny modern sense. I intended, and I made the marriage. I saw he'd fallen in love with her--dear little man--though at the time he didn't know it himself. And since then I've had the satisfaction--one of the greatest of my life--of seeing how happy I had made both of them. It was obvious, touchingly so, that he was desperately in love with Helen. Yes, Gerald, don't come to me for sympathy and help. You've wrecked a thing I had set my heart on. You've wrecked Mr. Kane, and my opinion is that you've wrecked Helen too.' Gerald, who had become very pale, kept his eyes on her, and he went back to his one foothold in a rocking world. 'Helen could never have loved him.'