He held her, hearing her sobs, feeling them lift her breast, and, in all his great astonishment, like a smile, the memory of the other day stole over him, the stillness, the accomplishment, the blissful peace, the lifting to a serene eternity of space. To remember it now was like seeing the sky from a nest, and in the sweet darkness of sudden security he murmured: '_You_ are the foolish child.' 'How can I believe you love me?' said Helen. 'How can you not?' They sat side by side, her arms around him and his head upon her breast. 'It was only because I told you----' 'Well--isn't that reason enough?' 'How can it be reason enough for me?' 'How can it not? You've spent your whole life hiding from me; when I saw you, why, of course, I fell in love at once. O Helen--dear, dear Helen!' 'When you saw my love.' 'Wasn't that seeing you?' They spoke in whispers, and their hearts were not in their words. He raised his head and looked at her, and he smiled at her now with the smile of the beautiful necessity. 'How you've frightened me,' he said. 'Don't be proud. Even if it did need your cleverness to show me that, too. I mean--you've given me everything--always--and why shouldn't you have given me the chance to see you--and to know what you are to me? How you frightened me. You are not proud any longer. You love me.' She was not proud any longer. She loved him. Vaguely, in the bewilderment of her strange, her blissful humility, among the great billows of life that encompassed and lifted her, it seemed with enormous heart-beats, Helen remembered Franklin's words. 'Let it melt--please let it melt, dear Helen.' But it had needed the inarticulate, the instinctive, to pierce to the depths of life. Gerald's tears, his head so boyishly pressed against her, his arms so childishly clinging, had told her what her heart might have been dead to for ever if, with reason and self-command, he had tried to put it into words. She looked at him, through her tears, and she knew him dearer to her in this resurrection than if her heart had never died to him; and, as he smiled at her, she, too, smiled back, tremblingly. CHAPTER XXXIII.