“I’m not unkind.  I’m afraid!”

“Afraid of what?”

“I told you,” she said piteously, “I didn’t want to marry—­I didn’t want to be bound!”

“And you haven’t changed your mind at all?”

She didn’t answer.  There was silence a moment.  Then she said abruptly: 

“Do you want to hear secrets, Geoffrey?”

He pondered.

“I don’t know.  I expect I guess them.”

“What do you guess?” She lifted a proud face.  He touched her hand tenderly.

“I guess that when you came here—­you were unhappy?”

Her lip trembled.

“I was—­very unhappy.”

“And now?” he asked, caressing the hand he held.

“Well, now—­I’ve walked myself back into—­into common sense.  There!—­I had it out with myself.  I may as well have it out with you!  Two months ago I was a bit in love with Cousin Philip.  Now, of course, I love him—­I always shall love him—­but I’m not in love with him!”

“Thank the Lord!” cried French—­“since it has been the object of my life for much more than two months to persuade you to be in love with me!”

“I don’t think I am—­yet,” said Helena slowly.

Her look was strange—­half repellent.  On both sides indeed there was a note of something else than prosperous love-making.  On his, the haunting doubt lest she had so far given her heart to Philip that full fruition for himself, that full fruition which youth at its zenith instinctively claims from love and fortune, could never be his.  On hers, the consciousness, scarcely recognized till now, of a moment of mental exhaustion caused by mental conflict.  She was half indignant that he should press her, yet aware that she would miss the pressure if it ceased; while he, believing that his cause was really won, and urged on by Peter’s hints, resented the barriers she would still put up between them.

There was a short silence after her last speech.  Then Helena said softly—­half laughing: 

“You haven’t talked philosophy to me, Geoffrey, for such a long time!”

“What’s the use?” said Geoffrey, who was lying on his face, his eyes covered by his hands—­“I’m not feeling philosophical.”

“All the same, you made me once read half a volume of Bergson.  I didn’t understand much of it, except that—­whatever else he is, he’s a great poet.  And I do know something about poetry!  But I remember one sentence very well—­Life—­isn’t it Life?—­is ’an action which is making itself, across an action of the same kind which is unmaking itself.’  And he compares it to a rocket in a fire-works display rushing up in flame through the falling cinders of the dead rockets.”

She paused.

“Go on—­”

“Give the cinders a little time to fall, Geoffrey!” she said in a faltering voice.

He looked up ardently.