She rose from her chair by the lamp, and walked to and fro in the room. When she stood she was a tall woman, almost large, showing the growth that the New England stock can develop in a favorable environment. While she read, her features had been quite dull, but they were fired now with feeling, and the deep eyes burned. Mrs. Spellman, whose thoughts had travelled rapidly, asked suddenly with apparent irrelevancy:-- "How would you like to spend a year in Europe?" "Why should we?" the girl demanded quickly, pausing opposite her mother. "What makes you say that?" "There isn't much to keep us here," Mrs. Spellman explained. "You enjoyed your trip so much, and I am stronger now. We needn't travel, you know." The girl turned away her face, as she answered evasively, "But why should we go away? I don't want to leave Chicago." She divined that her mother was thinking of what had occurred to her many times, as these last days had gone by without their seeing the young architect. Possibly, now that he knew himself to be without fortune, he wished to show her plainly that there could be no question of marriage between them. She rejected the idea haughtily, and resented her mother's acceptance of it which was implied in her suggestion. And even if it were so, she was not the one to admit to herself the wound. It would be no pleasure for her to go away. Could it be true that he was thinking of fighting the will? Her heart scorned the suggestion, for there was in her one immense capacity, one fiery power, and that was the instinct to transform all that she knew and felt into something finer than it actually was. Her eyes were blind to the sordid lines in the picture; her ears deaf to the discordant notes. In that long passage home through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic her soul had given itself unknown to herself to this man, and she could not admit the slightest disloyalty to her conception of him! She returned to her chair, resolutely picked up her book, and turned the pages with a methodical, unseeing regularity. As the clock tinkled off nine strokes, Mrs. Spellman rose, kissed the girl, silently pressing her fingers on the light folds of her hair, and went upstairs. Another half hour went by; then, as the clock neared ten, the doorbell rang. Helen, recollecting that the servants had probably left the kitchen, put down her book and stepped into the hall. She waited a moment there, but when the bell rang a second time she went resolutely to the door and opened it. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "Jackson! I thought it might be a tramp." "Well, perhaps you aren't so far wrong," the architect answered with a laugh. "I've been walking miles. Is it too late to come in?" For answer she held the door wide open. "I have been dining with Mrs. Phillips; she has asked me to draw some plans for her," Jackson explained. "As I came by the house, I thought I would tell you and your mother about it."