"You ought to tell your papa everything," I said gravely.
"I wish I could," she cried in a trembling voice. "But I can't. He would not let me stay here, and I could not go away. You must never tell papa, Floyd--never!"
I said I would not tell with the air of one who never discloses a secret; and she believed in me, and we were soon bright and happy again, and wrote a letter to Georgy Lenox inviting her to The Headlands on a visit.
With all his faults and weaknesses, I soon found there were good and lovable traits in Mr. Raymond. He had been in early life a successful merchant, and the habit of controlling widespread interests had given him a broad and sympathetic insight into men and their ideas. He possessed a graceful and comprehensive culture, and had embodied his conceptions of the fitness of things in the arrangement of his home, making it beautiful in all ways. He was an old man now, yet had not lost the thirst for knowledge, and could talk, when inspiration was upon him, generously and eloquently. He had been a part of the busy great world; he understood society and social ways: all these talents and acquirements made him a pleasant old gentleman when at his best, but it needed only a touch of suspicion or jealousy to put him at his worst. It was easy enough to see that Helen did not exaggerate when she told me he had nothing to care for but herself; and his care for her was so mixed with morbid fears that he was not first in her heart, so embittered by a distrust of her love for her father, that she could gain small comfort from all his overweening devotion and pride.
The child and I were constantly together in those October days. I do not think it would have been so but for the fact that Mr. Floyd wrote daily concise and peremptory orders that Helen was to be out of doors from morning till night, and that Dr. Sharpe, a brisk, keen-eyed old gentleman, came every morning at breakfast-time to feel the little girl's pulse, order her meals and command Mr. Raymond to let her have all the play she could get before the cold weather came.
"You see," Helen would explain to me as we tramped the meadows and the uplands gorgeous with every mellow hue of autumn's glorious time--"you see, Floyd, I was going to die in September when papa came. Oh, I felt so tired I wanted just to go to sleep. But papa came, took me in his arms and held me there. Whenever I woke up, there he was, his strong arms holding me tight. He wouldn't let me go, you know, so I couldn't die. I couldn't have lived for grandpa: I knew that he would die too, and that perhaps it would all be best."