Yet Lois had not been able to understand, and Helen would hear no words of sympathy which were not as much for John as for herself.
It was not until Thursday that she had told Lois why she had come back.
They were in their pleasant sitting-room, Lois walking restlessly about, with such puzzled expectation on her face that its white sadness was almost banished.

Helen sat with her hands clasped loosely in her lap, and leaning her head against the window.

Below, there was the bloom and glory of the garden, butterflies darted through the sunshine, and the air was full of the honeyed hum of the bees.

But the silence of the room seemed only a breathless anxiety, which forbade rest of mind or body; and so Helen had roused herself, and tried to tell her cousin what it all meant; but even as she talked she felt Lois's unspoken condemnation of her husband, and her voice hardened, and she continued with such apparent indifference Lois was entirely deceived.

"So you see," she ended, "I cannot go back to Lockhaven." Lois, walking back and forth, as impatient as her father might have been, listened, her eyes first filling with tears, and then flashing angrily.
She threw herself on her knees beside Helen, as she finished, and put her arms about her cousin's waist, kissing her listless hands in a passion of sympathy.