She pushed him from her, and rose hurriedly. "Oh!" she sobbed, "you are cruel. Do you want to break _two_ hearts!" Then, as if alarmed at her own words, she added quickly, "You must go away now and leave me. I am all unnerved--I can not give you any more advice to-day. Please go." But as he turned to obey her, she called him back. "One word only I would say to you now. Do not tell--your friend, what you have told me. Do not tell her that you love another woman. It will be hard enough for her to know that you are to go out of her life, without having that bitter knowledge added." "God bless you!" he cried, his eyes full of tears. "You are the most generous woman I ever dreamed of in my wildest visions of what was noble." Even in the supreme hour of her own new found misery--a misery so vast it seemed to fill the whole earth--Helena thought of her rival and tried to save her pain. Truly had Percy said she was one woman in a million. CHAPTER XX. THE HARVEST OF TARES. Percy returned to the Hotel, and before taking the train for New York, he wrote Helena a letter. Its contents were as follows: "MY QUEEN: "All my life I have worshiped an ideal. Just when I had grown to believe, that she did not exist save in my dreams, you flashed upon my horizon. I loved you; but I have not dared dream that you would love me, until to-day. I saw it in your face, dear, and I know that you are a woman who, once loving, will love forever. You know the story of my life. I am going abroad very soon. I shall remain away, until this miserable experience of which I told you, this terrible error, becomes a thing of the past. I shall strive to make myself worthy of your respect, of your love. When I come back, I shall ask you to be my wife, Helena. Until then, farewell. Read the verses I enclose. I found them in the poet's corner of one of our daily papers, and cut them out, because they seemed like a versified history of my own life. First, the mirage dream--then the jungle of the senses, then the cold world of fashion, until I lost faith in the existence of the storied Land of Love. "Then I met you, and you taught me that the true kingdom of love lies in the precincts of a pure home. Farewell, my sweet saint, my angel guide. "PERCY DURAND." The poem he enclosed we give below. THE KINGDOM OF LOVE. In the dawn of the day, when the sea and the earth Reflected the sunrise above, I set forth, with a heart full of courage and mirth, To seek for the Kingdom of Love. I asked of a Poet I met on the way, Which cross-road would lead me aright. And he said: "Follow me, and ere long you will see Its glistening turrets of Light."