can bear--that calls me out of my tent. I have tried to keep my poor self
out of sight, but it has rights. You have challenged it. Will you take
the consequences?"

She trembled before the pale concentration of his face and bent her head.

"I will tell you," he said in a low determined voice, "the only story
that a man truly knows--the story of his own soul. You shall know--what
you hate."

And, after a pause of thought, Helbeck made one of the great efforts of
his life.

* * * * *

He did not fully know indeed what it was that he had undertaken, till the
wave of emotion had gathered through all the inmost chambers of memory,
and was bearing outward in one great tide the secret nobilities, the
hidden poetries, the unconscious weaknesses, of a nature no less narrow
than profound, no less full of enmities than of loves.

But gradually from hurried or broken beginnings the narrative rose to
clearness and to strength.

The first impressions of a lonely childhood; the first workings of the
family history upon his boyish sense, like the faint, perpetual touches
of an unseen hand moulding the will and the character; the picture of his
patient mother on her sofa, surrounded with her little religious books,
twisted and tormented, yet always smiling; his early collisions with his
morose and half-educated father--he passed from these to the days of his