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Philip proceeded to make it easier.

“Will you miss me,” he asked, “in the Row, where I used to wait among the trees to see you ride past? Will you miss me at dances, where I used to hide behind the dowagers to watch you waltzing by? Will you miss me at night, when you come home by sunrise, and I am not hiding against the railings of the Carlton Club, just to see you run across the pavement from your carriage, just to see the light on your window blind, just to see the light go out, and to know that you are sleeping?”

Helen’s eyes were smiling happily. She looked away from him.

“Did you use to do that?” she asked.

“Every night I do that,” said Philip. “Ask the policemen! They arrested me three times.”

“Why?” said Helen gently.

But Philip was not yet free to speak, so he said:

“They thought I was a burglar.”

Helen frowned. He was making it very hard for her.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Why did you keep guard outside my window?”

“It was the policeman kept guard,” said Philip. “I was there only as a burglar. I came to rob. But I was a coward, or else I had a conscience, or else I knew my own unworthiness.” There was a long pause. As both of them, whenever they heard the tune afterward, always remembered, the Hungarian band, with rare inconsequence, was playing the “Grizzly Bear,” and people were trying to speak to Helen. By her they were received with a look of so complete a lack of recognition, and by Philip with a glare of such savage hate, that they retreated in dismay. The pause seemed to last for many years.

At last Helen said: “Do you know the story of the two roses? They grew in a garden under a lady’s window. They both loved her. One looked up at her from the ground and sighed for her; but the other climbed to the lady’s window, and she lifted him in and kissed him–because he had dared to climb.”

Philip took out his watch and looked at it. But Helen did not mind his doing that, because she saw that his eyes were filled with tears. She was delighted to find that she was making it very hard for him, too.

“At any moment,” Philip said, “I may know whether I owe two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars which I can never pay, or whether I am worth about that sum. I should like to continue this conversation at the exact place where you last spoke–AFTER I know whether I am going to jail, or whether I am worth a quarter of a million dollars.”

Helen laughed aloud with happiness.

“I knew that was it!” she cried. “You don’t like my money. I was afraid you did not like ME. If you dislike my money, I will give it away, or I will give it to you to keep for me. The money does not matter, so long as you don’t dislike me.”

What Philip would have said to that, Helen could not know, for a page in many buttons rushed at him with a message from the telephone, and with a hand that trembled Philip snatched it. It read: “Combine is announced, shares have gone to thirty-one, shall I hold or sell?”

That at such a crisis he should permit of any interruption hurt Helen deeply. She regarded him with unhappy eyes. Philip read the message three times. At last, and not without uneasy doubts as to his own sanity, he grasped the preposterous truth. He was worth almost a quarter of a million dollars! At the page he shoved his last and only five-pound note. He pushed the boy from him.

“Run!” he commanded. “Get out of here, Tell him he is to SELL!”

He turned to Helen with a look in his eyes that could not be questioned or denied. He seemed incapable of speech, and, to break the silence, Helen said: “Is it good news?”

“That depends entirely upon you,” replied Philip soberly. “Indeed, all my future life depends upon what you are going to say next.”

Helen breathed deeply and happily.

“And–what am I going to say?”

“How can I know that?” demanded Philip. “Am I a mind reader?”

But what she said may be safely guessed from the fact that they both chucked Lady Woodcotes luncheon, and ate one of penny buns, which they shared with the bears in Regents Park.

Philip was just able to pay for the penny buns. Helen paid for the taxi-cab.