'Why?' she asked, point blank.
'Well, I suppose I meant to say that you have nobler instincts than most other people.'
'Come, you are not trying to pay me a compliment? I don't want compliments; I hate and detest them. Leave them to stupid and uninteresting men.'
'And to stupid and uninteresting women?'
'Another try at a compliment!'
'No; I felt that.'
'Well, anyhow, I did not entice you in here to hear anything about myself; I know all about myself.'
'Indeed,' he said straightforwardly, 'I do not care to pay compliments, and I should never think of wearying you with them. I believe I hardly quite knew what I was talking about just now.'
'Very well; it does not matter. I want to hear about you. I want to know all about you. I want you to trust in me and treat me as your friend.'
'But what do you want me to tell you?'
'About yourself and your projects and everything. Will you?'
The Dictator was a little bewildered by the girl's earnestness, her energy, and the perfect simplicity of her evident belief that she was saying nothing unreasonable. She saw reluctance and hesitation in his eyes.
'You are very young,' he began.
'Too young to be trusted?'
'No, I did not say that.'
'But your look said it.'
'My look then mistranslated my feeling.'
'What did you feel?'
'Surprise, and interest, and gratitude.'
She tossed her head impatiently.
'Do you think I can't understand?' she asked, in her impetuous way—her imperial way with most others, but only an impetuous way with him. For most others with whom she was familiar she was able to control and be familiar with, but she could only be impetuous with the Dictator. Indeed, it was the high tide of her emotion which carried her away so far as to fling her in mere impetuousness against him.
The Dictator was silent for a moment, and then he said: 'You don't seem much more than a child to me.'
'Oh! Why? Do you not know?—I am twenty-three!'
'I am twenty-three,' the Dictator murmured, looking at her with a kindly and half-melancholy interest. 'You are twenty-three! Well, there it is—do you not see, Miss Langley?'
'There what is?'
'There is all the difference. To be twenty-three seems to you to make you quite a grown-up person.'
'What else should it make me? I have been of age for two years. What am I but a grown-up person?'
'Not in my sense,' he said placidly. 'You see, I have gone through so much, and lived so many lives, that I begin to feel quite like an old man already. Why, I might have had a daughter as old as you.'
'Oh, stuff!' the audacious young woman interposed.
'Stuff? How do you know?'
'As if I hadn't read lives of you in all the papers and magazines and I don't know what. I can tell you your birthday if you wish, and the year of your birth. You are quite young—in my eyes.'
'You are kind to me,' he said, gravely, 'and I am quite sure that I look at my very best in your eyes.'
'You do indeed,' she said fervently, gratefully.
'Still, that does not prevent me from being twenty years older than you.'
'All right; but would you refuse to talk frankly and sensibly about yourself?—sensibly, I mean, as one talks to a friend and not as one talks to a child. Would you refuse to talk in that way to a young man merely because you were twenty years older than he?'
'I am not much of a talker,' he said, 'and I very much doubt if I should talk to a young man at all about my projects, unless, of course, to my friend Hamilton.'
Helena turned half away disappointed. It was of no use, then—she was not his friend. He did not care to reveal himself to her; and yet she thought she could do so much to help him. She felt that tears were beginning to gather in her eyes, and she would not for all the world that he should see them.
'I thought we were friends,' she said, giving out the words very much as a child might give them out—and, indeed, her heart was much more as that of a little child than she herself knew or than he knew then; for she had not the least idea that she was in love or likely to be in love with the Dictator. Her free, energetic, wild-falcon spirit had never as yet troubled itself with thoughts of such kind. She had made a hero for herself out of the Dictator—she almost adored him; but it was with the most genuine hero-worship—or fetish-worship, if that be the better and harsher way of putting it—and she had never thought of being in love with him. Her highest ambition up to this hour was to be his friend and to be admitted to his confidence, and—oh, happy recognition!—to be consulted by him. When she said 'I thought we were friends,' she jumped up and went towards the window to hide the emotion which she knew was only too likely to make itself felt.
The Dictator got up and followed her. 'We are friends,' he said.
She looked brightly round at him, but perhaps he saw in her eyes that she had been feeling a keen disappointment.
'You think my professed friendship mere girlish inquisitiveness—you know you do,' she said, for she was still angry.
'Indeed I do not,' he said earnestly. 'I have had no friendship since I came back an outcast to England—no friendship like that given to me by you——'
She turned round delightedly towards him.
'And by your father.'
And again, she could not tell why, she turned partly away.
'But the truth is,' he went on to say, 'I have no clearly defined plans as yet.'
'You don't mean to give in?' she asked eagerly.
He smiled at her impetuosity. She blushed slightly as she saw his smile.
'Oh I know,' she exclaimed, 'you think me an impertinent schoolgirl, and you only laugh at me.'
'I do nothing of the kind. It is only too much of a pleasure to me to talk to you on terms of friendship. Look here, I wish we could do as people used to do in the old melodramas, and swear an eternal friendship.'
'I swear an eternal friendship to you,' she exclaimed, 'whether you like it or not,' and, obeying the wild impulse of the hour, she held out both her hands.
He took them both in his, held them for just one instant, and then let them go.
'I accept the friendship,' he said, with a quiet smile, 'and I reciprocate it with all my heart.'
Helena was already growing a little alarmed at her own impulsiveness and effusiveness. But there was something in the Dictator's quiet, grave, and protecting way which always seemed to reassure her. 'He will be sure to understand me,' was the vague thought in her mind.
Assuredly the Dictator now thought he did understand her. He felt satisfied that her enthusiasm was the enthusiasm of a generous girl's friendship, and that she thought about him in no other way. He had learned to like her companionship, and to think much of her fresh, courageous intellect, and even of her practical good sense. He had no doubt that he should find her advice on many things worth having. His battlefield just now and for some time to come must be in London—in the London of finance and diplomacy.
'Come and sit down again,' the Dictator said; 'I will tell you all I know—and I don't know much. I do not mean to give up, Miss Langley. I am not a man who gives up—I am not built that way.'
'Of