They didn’t refer to that life together in their letters, not directly. They didn’t refer to it at Easter-time when the discussions continued by the rose-shaded lamp. Of course not. Stephen’s education was not finished yet. He had a whole year and a half at the law school still before he would even start upon a self-supporting career. But Helen was not impatient. She liked prolonging the sweet adventure. It couldn’t possibly come out but one way. Stephen’s eyes had told her over and over that she was the only girl in the world for him, and her eyes had replied, shiningly, mistily, that she knew it—she knew it and was glad! At least she thought that was what his eyes had said. She thought he understood what she had replied.

When his father did that awful thing, Helen’s love for Stephen burst into a blinding desire to help and comfort and share. Her own father had died a few months before. She was alone in the world. If Stephen had need of her, she had need of him, too. She must tell him so when his long torturing journey home was over and he came to her.

Helen waited for three days for Stephen to come to her. Finally, convinced that he was waiting for a sign from her, she stole out quietly, one evening, by herself, and called at the Dallas’s big brown house, shrouded in its silent and solemn horror. She stood on the doorstep and rang the bell, and without explanation asked for Stephen. He was out. She left her card with a hasty pencil message written on it, “Please come over tonight. Helen.” But he didn’t come.

4

HELEN DIDN’T SEE Stephen Dallas again until one day, fifteen years later, sauntering along one of the bridle-paths of Central Park, she glanced up and there he was standing before her (on horseback also) with his hat off, smiling and saying, “Do you remember me?”

Her heart had jumped up into her throat in the same old young way it used to at the sight of him a lifetime ago.

5

WHEN HELEN TOLD Cornelius Morrison that she would marry him, she felt that Stephen was as definitely lost to her as her father. When the doctor had come to her just after her father had died and said “It is all over,” his words were no more final than Stephen’s letter, which Helen received a long three weeks after she had called at the Dallas house. The letter was in answer to her note of consolation. For Helen had written to Stephen an outburst of sympathy at the first possible moment.