CHAPTER XVI
Helena hardly believed her own happiness. She was preparing for her marriage. Her clouded past had vanished, life's night was over, the morning was shining.
From a woman of a wandering star, who knew not where and how low she might fall, from a woman who was a beggar, from a woman without a morrow, to enter into a new period of life, to receive the affection of a man whom she loved, to become in the future a wife, to begin a calm life, a life which had a to-morrow, surrounded by respect, filled with love and duty,—that was her future.
Helena understood, or rather had a prescience of the abnormal relation between her past and her future. "From such a life as mine that ought not to come. I am not worthy of this happiness," whispered she to Yosef, when he placed the ring of betrothal on her finger. "I am not worthy of such happiness."
That half-insane woman possessed of love was right. Out of the logic of life such a
