"Some day perhaps, Helena," he said, "you could learn to love me--for I would teach you. Perhaps now you feel that your whole duty lies here in this work to which you have so unselfishly given your life; but I would not hinder that, only try to help as best I could. Perhaps I have been abrupt, have spoken too soon--it is only a few weeks since I saw you first, but it seems as though in those few weeks I had come to know you as if I had known you all my life and--" But now she interrupted him, shaking her head in a sad little fashion. "You do not know me," she said. "Sometimes I think I do not know myself. Think! You do not know where I came from to join the Patriarch here; you have no single shred of knowledge about me; you do not know a single particular of my life before you knew me." "I do not need to know," he answered gravely. "You are as genuine as pure gold is genuine--it is in your voice, your smile, your eyes. It is a crude simile perhaps, but one never asks where the pure gold was dug--it stands for itself, for what it is, because it is what it is--pure gold--at its face value." The words seemed to stab at Helena, condemning, accusing; and yet, too, in a strange, vague way, they seemed to bring her a hope, a promise for the days to come--at face value! If she could live hereafter--at face value! "Listen," she said, and her voice was very low. "I do not know how to say what I must say to you. Last night I knew that--that you loved me. I had not thought of you like that, in that way, until then, or--or I should have tried never to have let this hurt come to you. But last night I knew, and since then I have known that sooner or later you would--would tell me of it." She stopped for an instant--her eyes full of tears now. "And so," she went on presently, "I have let you speak to-night because it was better, it was even necessary that I should do so at once--because this could not go on--because you must go away and--" "Necessary?" he repeated. "I--I do not understand." "No," she said helplessly; "you do not understand--and I--I cannot explain. Oh, I do not know what to say to you, only that you must take what I say, as you have taken me--at face value." "I do not understand," he said again. "Helena, I do not understand. Are you in trouble--tell me?" "No," she said. "But I cannot go away like this!" he cried out suddenly. "I cannot go and leave you, Helena. You have come into my life and filled it; and I cannot let you pass out of it--like this--without an effort to hold what has come to mean everything to me now. You may not love me now, but some day--" She shook her head, interrupting him once more. "There can never be a 'some day,'" she said. "Oh, I do not want to hurt you--you, to whom I owe more than you will ever know--but--but there can never be anything between us, and--and we are only making it harder for ourselves now--aren't we?" And then he leaned abruptly toward her.