“Then you did think it a little unbecoming?” persisted Helen.

“No, I did not!” said Denzil sharply.  “An independent woman may do many things that a married woman may not.  Marriage brings its own duties and responsibilities,—­time enough to consider them when they come.”

He turned angrily on his heel and left her, and Helen, burying her fair face in her hands, wept long and unrestrainedly.  This “strange woman out of Egypt” had turned her brother’s heart against her, and stolen away her almost declared lover.  It was no wonder that her tears fell fast, wrung from her with the pain of this double wound; for Helen, though quiet and undemonstrative, had fine feelings and unsounded depths of passion in her nature, and the fatal attraction she felt for Armand Gervase was more powerful than she had herself known.  Now that he had openly confessed his infatuation for another woman, it seemed as though the earth had opened at her feet and shown her nothing but a grave in which to fall.  Life—­empty and blank and bare of love and tenderness, stretched before her imagination; she saw herself toiling along the monotonously even road of duty till her hair became gray and her face thin and wan and wrinkled, and never a gleam again of the beautiful, glowing, romantic passion that for a short time had made her days splendid with the dreams that are sweeter than all realities.

Poor Helen!  It was little marvel that she wept as all women weep when their hearts are broken.  It is so easy to break a heart; sometimes a mere word will do it.  But the vanishing of the winged Love-god from the soul is even more than heart-break,—­it is utter and irretrievable loss,—­complete and dominating chaos out of which no good thing can ever be designed or created.  In our days we do our best to supply the place of a reluctant Eros by the gilded, grinning Mammon-figure which we try to consider as superior to any silver-pinioned god that ever descended in his rainbow car to sing heavenly songs to mortals; but it is an unlovely substitute,—­a hideous idol at best; and grasp its golden knees and worship it as we will, it gives us little or no comfort in the hours of strong temptation or trouble.  We have made a mistake—­we, in our progressive generation,—­we have banished the old sweetnesses, triumphs and delights of life, and we have got in exchange steam and electricity.  But the heart of the age clamors on unsatisfied,—­none of our “new” ideas content it—­nothing pacifies its restless yearning; it feels—­this great heart of human life—­that it is losing more than it gains, hence the incessant, restless aching of the time, and the perpetual longing for something Science cannot teach,—­something vague, beautiful, indefinable, yet satisfying to every pulse of the soul; and the nearest emotion to that divine solace is what we in our higher and better moments recognize as Love.  And Love was lost to Helen Murray; the choice pearl had fallen in the vast gulf of Might-have-been, and not all the forces of Nature would ever restore to her that priceless gem.