'Not of everything,' said Helen, glad really of the small consolation she could offer him. 'Not of financial safety, as it happens. It will make you less unhappy to hear, so I must tell you, Franklin is arranging things with Aunt Grizel so that when she dies I shall come into quite a nice little bit of money. I shall have no more sordid worries. In that way you mustn't have me on your conscience.' Gerald's eyes were on her and they took in this fact of her safety with no commotion; it was but one--and a lesser--among the many strange facts he had had to take in. And he forced himself to look squarely at what he had conceived to be the final impossibility as he asked: 'And--in other ways?--Could you have fallen in love with him, Helen?' It was so bad, so inconceivably bad a thing to face, that his relief was like a joy when Helen answered. 'No, I could never have fallen in love with dear Franklin. But I cared for him very much, the more, no doubt, from having ceased to care about love. I felt that he was the best person, the truest, the dearest, I had ever known, and that we would make a success of our life together.' 'Yes, yes, of course,' Gerald hastened past her qualifications to the one liberating fact. 'Two people like you would have had to. But you didn't love him; you couldn't have come to love him. I haven't robbed you of a man you could have loved.' She saw his immense relief. The joy of it was in his eyes and voice; and the thought of Franklin, of what she had not been able to do for Franklin, made it bitter to her that because she had not been able to save Franklin, Gerald should find relief. 'You couldn't have robbed me of him if there'd been any chance of that,' she said. 'If there had been any chance of my loving Franklin I would never have let him go. Don't be glad, don't show me that you are glad--because I didn't love him.' 'I can't help being glad, Helen,' he said. She leaned her head on her hand, covering her eyes. While he was there, showing her that he was glad because she had not loved Franklin, she could not be kind, nor even just to him. 'Helen,' he said, 'I know what you are feeling; but will you listen to me?' She answered that she would listen to anything he had to say, and her voice had the leaden tone of impersonal charity. 'Helen,' Gerald said, 'I know how I've blundered. I see everything. But, with it all, seeing it all, I don't think that you are fair to me. I don't think it is fair if you can't see that I couldn't have thought of all these other possibilities--after what you'd told me--the other day. How could I think of anything, then, but the one thing--that you loved me and that I loved you, and that, of course, I must set my mistake right at once, set Althea free and come to you? I was very simple and very stupid; but I don't think it's fair not to see that I couldn't believe you'd really repulse me, finally, if you loved me.'