Franklin's past, she had guessed that he had never in all his life
been so happy, and that never had life so taken hold of him. He enjoyed
the pearls, he enjoyed the emerald, he enjoyed the Jacobean house and
going over it with her and Aunt Grizel; above all he enjoyed herself as
a thinking and acting being, the turning of her attention to atoms, her
grave, steady penetration of his life. And in this happiness the
something controlled and mastered had melted more and more; she had
intended that it should melt. She had guessed at the pain, the anxiety
for her that had underlain the dear little man's imperturbability, and
she had determined that as far as in her lay Franklin should think her
happy, should think that, at all events, she was serene and without
qualms or misgivings. And she had accomplished this. It was as if she
saw him breathing more deeply, more easily; as if, with a long sigh of
relief, he smiled at her and said, with a new accent of confidence: 'All
right.' And then, after the sigh of relief, she saw that he became too
happy. It was only yesterday that she began to see it; it was to-day
that she had clearly seen that Franklin had fallen in love with her.

It wasn't that, in any blindness to what she meant, he came nearer and
made mistakes. He did not come a step nearer, and, in his happiness, his
unconscious happiness, he was further from the possibility of mistakes
than before. He did not draw near. He stood and gazed. Men had loved
Helen before, yet, she felt it, no man had loved her as Franklin did.
She could not have analysed the difference between his love and that of
other men, yet she felt it dimly. Franklin stood and gazed; but it was
not at charm or beauty that he gazed; whether he was really deeply aware
of them she could not tell; the only words she could find with which to
express her predicament and its cause sounded silly to her, but she
could find no others. Franklin was gazing at her soul. She couldn't
imagine what he found to fix him in it; he had certainly said that she
was the honestest woman he had known; she gloomily made out that she
was, she supposed, 'straight'; she liked clear, firm things, and she
liked to keep a bargain. It didn't seem to her a very arresting array of
virtues; but then--no, she couldn't settle Franklin's case so glibly as
that; if it wasn't what she might have of charm that he had fallen in
love with, it wasn't what she might have of virtue either. Perhaps one'