Fenton watched her idly, knowing perfectly that the woman before him was capable of sacrificing for him all the little income which was her's; and he wondered, as men will, how deep her feeling for him had really become, and whether it had ever passed that mysterious and undefinable line which separates love from friendship. Helen had often endeavored to assist the artist out of some financial difficulty by buying one of his unsellable pictures, a pretext which he had the grace to put aside by refusing to sell, sometimes sending her as a gift precisely the work for which he could most easily find a purchaser. There was continually a silent struggle, more or less consciously carried on between the two, although seldom appearing upon the surface. Too much Fenton's friend not to be pained by his weaknesses, Helen was stung to the quick by a certain insincerity which she often detected alike beneath his raillery and his cynicism. Too noble to yield to any belief in a friend's unworthiness without resistance, she suffered anew whenever his words seemed to ring false, and now there were tears in her eyes as she looked out into the sunny street. She pressed them firmly back, however, and turned a calm face towards her guest, who sat playing with his spoon and watching her with a half troubled, half amused expression. "I've composed my epitaph," he said irrelevantly. "Will you please compose my monument." "Oh, willingly. But it will be necessary to know the epitaph, so that the monument may express the same sentiment." "I shall have no name," Arthur returned. "Only-- _L'homme est mort. Soit_. How does that strike you?" "Ah," she cried impulsively, "how does any thing strike me? You play at being wretched as sentimental school girls do, when in their case it is slate pencils and pickled limes and in your case it is vanity. If you were half as miserable as you pretend, you'd have blown your brains out long ago, or deemed yourself the veriest craven alive. I've no patience with such attitudinizing." "You are partly right," he admitted, "but do any of us find the savor of life so sweet as to make it worth while?" Something in his voice, a ring of what might be pity in his tone, humiliated Helen. She suspected that he thought her outburst arose from a too great fondness for himself, for grief at parting and at giving him up to another. She struggled to regain her calmness; she felt the impossibility of contradicting the belief which she was sure existed in his mind; she was conscious that to say, "I do not love you," would appear to him proof incontrovertible that the reverse was true. Her throat contracted painfully and she cast down her eyes lest the tears in them should be seen.