Helen was very sorry to part with Alice. “I have lost my ballast, and, like Jeff, shall go to destruction sure,” she said, and for days she seemed so sad and depressed that Craig tried every effort to comfort her, taking her for a long drive around the chain of ponds and talking to her of what he thought would interest her most. There had been no Browning readings after that first attempt. “As no one cares for them except ourselves, we may as well give them up, but whenever you feel like it I shall be glad to read for _you_,” he had said to her, and Helen, while lamenting the non-appreciation of the others, had acquiesced in his decision, and on two or three different occasions, after Alice left, she sat on a low ottoman very close to him and listened patiently for half an hour while he read to her, once from Sordello, once from poems easier to be understood, and last from Pauline, whose opening stanza thrilled them both with as much of real love as either could ever feel for the other. In a voice, full of feeling, Craig read: “Pauline, mine own, bend o’er me,—thy sweet eyes, And loosened hair and breathing lips and arms Drawing me to thee,—these build up a screen To shut me in with thee, and from all fear;” And again: “Thou art so good, So calm—” And again; in a lower voice, which was almost a whisper: “Thou lovest me; And thou art to receive not love but faith, For which thou wilt be mine—” etc. He did not ask her what she thought was meant by this outburst of passion. He only looked at her once as she sat beside him, with her hands working together nervously on her lap, her “sweet eyes” upon him with a coy expression in them, and her “breathing lips” a little apart as she drank in the words and felt that something more was meant for her than a repetition of an imaginary love-sick boy’s declaration of love to his mistress. She was very quiet all through the reading, and when it was over left Craig without a word except, “Thanks for the pleasure you have given me.” Had he been making love to her, she asked herself many times in her own room, and would he follow it up with words plainer to be understood than those spoken to Pauline. And if he did, what answer should she give. “There is only one I can give him, and he is too good a man for that, but mamma, position, society lie that way. To take the other road would be folly,” she thought, and for an hour or more fought a fierce battle with herself and her inclination. For two days she avoided both Craig and Mark as much as possible, and scarcely spoke when she met them. She was missing Alice, and wanted to go home.