CHAPTER XXIV.

She's mine-mine-mine !-her heart, her life, her soul:
She's mine, from head to foot, and through and through.
Have I not won the guerdon of the game?

Are not its forfeit tokens, coin by coin,
Obverse and reverse, image, legend, mine-

By code and compact mine-mine, mine alone?
Call me no cheat, if losers will not pay.

"HOME!" said Helen to her coachman, and then threw herself back into the corner of her carriage, and sobbed terribly. She was not struck to such utter stone by the news she had heard as to have lost the relief of tears. Whatever had happened, she could never forget how to weep, as a child might, for him who stood for the whole of her childhood and for all the happiness she had ever known. It was the Helen Reid of long ago, not Mrs. Gideon Skull, who was weeping for Alan.

But there was hardly a trace of tears left when she reached home. She did not even wait to collect herself or her thoughts, but walked straight into the room where her husband used to smoke and plan whenever he was at home-work, one can hardly call it, for the greater part of Gideon's Skull's occupation, like that of Mr. Aristides, consisted in thinking about the work of others. But even that is very hard work sometimes; and if Helen had not been so full of her own thoughts she must have noticed that this evening, which he had spent at home and in solitude, had been unusually severe. He was not, as usual, lounging in an arm-chair, and apparently letting the smoke of his cigar do his thinking for him. Though there was neither book nor paper upon his writing-table, and though his hands were empty, he was seated at it in the attitude of a man who is deep in some absorbing labour, with his eyes fixed on the spot where one would have expected to find at least a sheet of note-paper. He was not even smoking, for, though he held a cigar between his lips, it had burned out without his noticing the change of flavour.

But Helen noticed nothing of all this. "Gideon!" she said, suddenly and sharply. He turned round on his seat as abruptly; and, without rising to welcome her home, looked heavily, almost stupidly, at his wife or rather, as it would seem, at some indifferent woman, or a still more indifferent bulk of black velvet, that happened to fill the doorway. He did not remove his forgotten cigar-stump even then, The contrast between them did not need strengthening by that between her black robes and pearls and his

shabby smoking-jacket, unbuttoned waistcoat, loosened collar, and tumbled hair.

"Gideon !" she said again, as she closed the door behind her ; "why did you marry me?"

"What the-what on earth do you mean?"

"I want to know. Why did you marry me?"

"Do you want me to tell you again?" A sort of change, though equally unnoticed by Helen, came over both his voice and his eyes. Both were still heavy and sullen; but, if it be lawful to rival Walter Gray in the art of look- and voice-reading, it was rather the passive sullenness which comes of weariness and long waiting, and there was an under-note of pleading in his voice, and an under-glow of admiration in his eyes. "Well-I will tell you again, and a thousand times again. It was because I loved you-more fool I, I suppose. I only wished to God it was one of the follies that can be cured. You know as well as I do that if I was free again I would marry you again. Put it, if you like, that I married you because I was a fool. And, if you like it better, put it that I am one still. That's why." "I have never thought you a fool, Gideon."

"You think a great many things about me, I know, that are not true. I had another reason."

"Well ?"

"I thought I loved you so much," he said, slowly and still more heavily, "that I should be able to make you give me some of it back-in time. Why shouldn't I do what hundreds of men, as unlikely as I am, have done? One must invest the principal before one can look for the interest-love is very like the rest of life, I suppose. I thought that when a man loved a woman as I loved you-like a man, and not like a boy, or an idiot, or a poet, or a slave-he couldn't manage to throw his whole life away even if he tried. I didn't think it possible that a man could care about a stone as I did for you: I thought that when a man loved, it stood to reason that what he loved was a woman."

"Have I been a bad wife to you? Have I

"You have been just the worst wife, Helen, that a man could find if he were to search the whole world round. I'm not angry with you for it: I'm not quite such an imbecile as to be angry with facts; but it's true."

"I have not meant to be a bad wife. God knows, I have meant to be a good one. I meant it from that terrible day when I married you. Till to-night, I have meant it always. What one thing have I done or left undone that"

"No thing-no thing except one. Only, that happens to be the only one that matters. I'm less to you even than I was on that day which you call terrible, and when I didn't even dream that you cared for me. I didn't marry you to be my partner, or my housekeeper, or my nurse if I chanced to fall ill-did I ?—or my representative at calls and crushes. I shouldn't call you a bad wife if you hated me—as wives go. Hating is being one's wife, in a way. But you don't even do that—_—____”

"Did I ever promise to love you, except in the form which you agreed with me, when it was made, should bind me no more than I might feel myself bound? I never pretended to give you more than just my hand and my duty-my duty to you only in the second place. You freed me from my formal promise in church before it was given, so that it meant-nothing. I have fulfilled my whole bargain, every jot and every tittle. And now-why did I marry you?"

"Because

"You know what people say-because you were rich and I was poor. You don't believe that, I know. You know that I married you for the sake of my brother-Alan. Of my mother, too; but even on our wedding-day it became for his sake alone."

"By Heaven, Helen, you must be mad yourself, or trying to make me so. Have I not done for him all that one man can do for another? Can I give him brains and eyes, and hands and eyes? I have given him every chance of using them all, but I can't use them for him. We don't even know if he is not using them. If he is, he will come back a millionaire. With his chances, I-he is doing well, because he must be doing well. Nobody, even without brains, can help doing well in-in Arizona. If he had been my own son, as well

as my brother, I would have sent him there."

"It is so strange that he never writes to me. For aught I know, he thinks his mother still alive."

"Why strange? He is a young man."

"He is Alan."

"That is to say, a very young man-younger than most young men. That's always the way with women. They think nobody is ever to change, and that if a thing has ever been done once, it has got to be done always. He got out of the way of letter-writing at the siege. Are you cold, Helen? Put on your shawl.—It is a habit soon lost and never recovered. He did not write before he left for Arizona, for the very good reason that he had to leave Brest at an hour's notice, and- But he telegraphed when he reached the

States, as you know. I am a man, you see, and know exactly how a man would act and feel. You are a woman, and can't know—not even how the man would feel to whom you give what you call your duty, and think it ought to be enough for him. . . . Well, perhaps it ought to be enough for him. . . .”

"Are you sure Alan is not dead, Gideon?" "Dead? No."

"No?' You mean, you are not sure?"

...

"How could he be dead? Nonsense, Helen! Something has made you nervous to-night-it is not like you. I was telling you that I know just what a man would feel. He has vowed not to return home without a fortune and a name-a name of his own, a name that he has a right to bear. He is just one of those sensitive, romantic natures who would feel like that, and act like that, too. He knows you would hear soon enough if anything happened to him. Of course he will have made his will. I know what I should have done if I, like him, had ever had the good luck to have anybody in the world who would care a straw whether I was dead or alive. I should take all precautions; but I would swear to myself, I will not even think of home till I can return as I ought to return. I will not weaken myself, and give nothing but suspense and disappointment to all who care for me, by sending home chronicles of the hundred failures which form the details of the struggle. My first news home shall be 'Victory'-and maybe I will give myself the pleasure of being my own despatch-bearer. Something very like that I did, Helen. I swore most solemnly, as a man can swear to none but himself, that my Uncle Christopher, my only relation on earth, should never hear of my existence until I could force him to be proud of me. I kept my word. And so will he keep his, you may be sure." 66 Perhaps he died even before he reached Arizona ? " "Helen late as it is, I have something to say to you" "About Alan?"

No. You are mad about Alan. He is all right

"Confenough-but-"

"But I must first know if I am mad about Alan or if I am perfectly sane. Perhaps he died before he reached Brest, Gideon?" "He telegraphed me from there. What in Heaven's name can you mean?"

"Then-you say-I need have no fear-that Alan, my own brother Alan, does not write to me because he-because he is like you; that he is no doubt prospering and conquering in Arizona; that he sailed from Brest; that he hurried there from Versailles-"

"Of course I say it

"Then, you are a liar, Gideon!"

Gideon Skull almost sprang from his seat, flushing burnt crimson. She read his flush and his silence in her own way.

"Yes," she said-but not quite so calmly-"I know now, as well as you know it, that every word you ever told me has been a lie. I learned to-night that he is dead, and that you knew it before what I did call that terrible day. I know that he never left Paris alive, much less Versailles! You forged that telegram from Brest; you wanted me-God knows why!-and you knew that, if Alan was dead, and if I knew it, I would have said 'No' to you at the altar. And you have kept up the lie, day by day, because, if I ever came to know the truth, you knew what that would mean to me; and you cared about what I might think of you-God knows why, again! . . . And I wronged my mother on her death-bed for Alan; and I have lived with you and put my neck under your foot for Alan; and he was dead, and I know it now :-and I know you.”

All the calmness with which she had led him on to his crowning lie had left her now. She did not give way to the cry of her deeper self, but stood before him breathing scorn; Victor Waldron himself had never seen her as she was now.

Gideon, after the first instant, became the calmer of the two. "On my honour as a gentleman," he said, without heeding the scorn that came into her eyes at the word, "I have no reason on earth for believing your brother not to be alive. Helen, as surely as that I am idiot enough to love you"

"Love! you told me you-loved me-on the day when you told me Alan lived and was well; and what sort of love-why should one thing be a lie, and the other not a lie?"

"Helen, if you have been told to-night that your brother is dead -well, I can bear all you say. For you are bound to speak madly. But what makes you believe such a thing?"

"Why should I prove what you know as well as I? But yes, I ought to give you my proof; I want to be fair even to you; it is right for you to see that I know—I should like to spare myself the shame of seeing even you defending lies by lies. I have seen tonight the man who saw Alan Reid die-who saw him killed in the streets of Paris, and who sent the news home-"

"1 heard of no such news. Do I look as if I were lying? Should I dare to look you in the face if I were? Do you suppose I went to those Spraggville people on my wedding morning, or ever again? You know that. Who is the man?"