"Helena!" he said in a numbed way; and again; "Helena!" Then, with an
effort to control his voice: "You--you do not care--you do not love me?"

"No," she said--and thereafter for a long time a silence held between
them.

Then Thornton spoke.

"Some day perhaps, Helena," he said, "you could learn to love me--for I
would teach you. Perhaps now you feel that your whole duty lies here in
this work to which you have so unselfishly given your life; but I would
not hinder that, only try to help as best I could. Perhaps I have been
abrupt, have spoken too soon--it is only a few weeks since I saw you
first, but it seems as though in those few weeks I had come to know you
as if I had known you all my life and--"

But now she interrupted him, shaking her head in a sad little fashion.

"You do not know me," she said. "Sometimes I think I do not know myself.
Think! You do not know where I came from to join the Patriarch here; you
have no single shred of knowledge about me; you do not know a single
particular of my life before you knew me."

"I do not need to know," he answered gravely. "You are as genuine as
pure gold is genuine--it is in your voice, your smile, your eyes. It is
a crude simile perhaps, but one never asks where the pure gold was
dug--it stands for itself, for what it is, because it is what it
is--pure gold--at its face value."