“Helen,” Pryde said earnestly, “you must help me persuade him to go at once.”
“I can’t do that, Stephen,” the girl replied slowly.
“I’m not so sure of that,” Helen said, shaking her head. “I have the same feeling that he has—exactly the same feeling.”
“Helen, be sensible!” he begged roughly. “Look things in the face! What evidence could there be here that would help you?”
“I can’t answer that,” she replied musingly, “at least not yet. All I know is that this is our one chance.”
Stephen Pryde winced. Hers and Hugh’s! They two linked by her, and always. “Yours and Hugh’s,” he said acidly. “Yes, but, Helen, aren’t you forgetting?”
“Oh,” she returned impatiently, “that was when he believed Hugh guilty; if he proves his innocence——”
“He hasn’t proved it yet,” Stephen broke in viciously.
“But he will,” she said firmly. “Stephen, I am sure he will. You—you wouldn’t wish to stand between us then?”
“Don’t you understand, Helen,” Pryde retorted, “that this is just what your father wanted to save you from? He realized that, if you ever came under Hugh’s influence again, he would make you believe in him.”
“Then you don’t believe in him?” She spoke coldly, and she was fully alert now.
“Stephen!” she cried, rising indignantly, recoiling from him in amazement.
“But I can’t,” Pryde added doggedly. He was furious now.
“Well, I can and do,” the girl said icily. “And I am going to stand by him, no matter what happens. I know he is innocent. But if he were guilty, a thousand times guilty, it would make no difference to me, none at all in my love. I’d only care for him the more, stand by him the more, and for ever and ever.”
The fierce color rushed to Pryde’s face, and his hands knotted together in pain.
“Helen,” he pled, “you are making things very difficult for me.”
“I am sorry, Stephen,” she said a little perfunctorily; “but I love Hugh,” she added proudly. “He is all I have in the world.”
“You don’t understand,” he retorted sternly. “I promised your father to take care of you. I mean to keep that promise.”
“No, I do not understand,” Helen said haughtily. She, too, was infuriated now.
“You must send Hugh away at once,” Stephen told her abruptly.
“Must? Do you think to force me to do as you wish?”
She had spoken insolently, and he was white to his lips. He loved her, all his life he had loved her; and she knew it. An older woman would have spared him a little, because of that love, because of his pain. Helen hit him again. She went a step nearer, and laughed in his face—a taunting laugh of scorn and dislike.