“Dear girl,” he said, “it will be delightful to have you at home. I was afraid that those happy days of work, you and I, side by side in this home, were over. I thank you for that, Helen; your father blesses you for that. Stop with me as long as you can. How long you--and he must settle. And, my dear, I am so selfish as to take your offer fully. Do not see him or write to him. Perhaps----“ He paused a moment, stroking her hand. “And try to make allowance for me,” he went on, “when I am hard or gloomy or out of spirits. But I am so utterly at sea: my landmarks have gone. I don’t understand. I can only pray that you and I may have light. God bless you, my dear, now and always.” Helen wrote the same day to Frank: “MY DEAREST,--I have just come home, and I have settled to do a thing which is very hard on both of us; but I cannot do otherwise. Frank, we cannot be married yet. We must put it off for six months, or seven, is it not,--till next May. And for six months I must live quietly at home here, and not see you. There, it is written. This, too: you are absolutely free. Ah, in spite of all these troubles, I can’t help smiling when I write that. “But I can’t act otherwise. My father is in a state of misery about it which I can’t describe to you. Somebody he loves is deliberately--this is how he sees it--going to do a wicked thing. This morning, when he talked to me about it, I wondered whether I could be right in continuing our engagement at all. But I can’t give you up. My love for you is the best part of me, and the most living part. You see I _am_ yours. Oh, my dear, if only things had been otherwise,--if you could believe! If you could only have not told me, have let me think you were a Christian. No, I don’t wish that really. It would not have been you. “He is my father. All my life he has watched over me, prayed for me, loved me. Even if he had been a bad father, I should still have owed him all I am, until the day I met you. And the only way in which I can repay him anything is by doing this. It is small change, I know, for all his gold, but it is all I have. At least, then, and at most I must do it. I must stop here with him,--he was such an old darling when I told him,--trying to be cheerful, trying in little, tiny human ways to be a good daughter to him. And it is all so infinitesimal. It is as if I gave him remedies for a cold in the head when he had cancer. I feel so mean in offering him so little. But there is only one other thing that I could offer him, and that I cannot. And, indeed, though this looks so little and makes little show, it costs me something. It does indeed.