her was the best thing that could come into his life. But to sit
down and lament over the fact that she did not love him did not,
to use his favorite expression, "tend toward efficiency." He
removed from his sight the three pictures of her he had cut from
illustrated papers, and ceased to write to her.

In his last letter he said: "I have told you how it is, and that
is how it is always going to be. There never has been, there
never can be any one but you. But my love is too precious, too
sacred to be brought out every week in a letter and dangled
before your eyes like an advertisement of a motor-car. It is too
wonderful a thing to be cheapened, to be subjected to slights and
silence. If ever you should want it, it is yours. It is here
waiting. But you must tell me so. I have done everything a man
can do to make you understand. But you do not want me or my love.
And my love says to me: 'Don't send me there again to have the
door shut in my face. Keep me with you to be your inspiration, to
help you to live worthily.' And so it shall be."

When Helen read that letter she did not know what to do. She did
not know how to answer it. Her first impression was that suddenly
she had grown very old, and that some one had turned off the sun,
and that in consequence the world had naturally grown cold and
dark. She could not see why the two hundred and forty-nine
expected her to keep on doing exactly the same things she had
been doing with delight for six months, and indeed for the last
six years. Why could they not see that no longer was there any
pleasure in them? She would have written and told Latimer that
she found she loved him very dearly if in her mind there had not
arisen a fearful doubt. Suppose his letter was not quite honest?