s
soul hadn't much to do with either charm or virtue. And, after all,
whatever it was, he was gazing at it, rapt, smiling, grave, in the
lover's trance. He saw her, and only her. And she saw him, and a great
many other things besides.

The immediate hope that came to her was that Franklin, perhaps, might
really never know just what had happened to him. If he never recognised
it, it might never become explicit; it might be managed; it could of
course be managed in any case; but how she should hate having him made
conscious of pain. If he never said to himself, and far less to her,
that he had fallen in love with her, he might not really suffer in the
strange, ill-adjusted union before them. She did not think that he had
yet said it to himself; but she feared that he was hovering on the verge
of self-recognition. His very guilelessness in the realm of the emotions
exposed him to her, and with her perplexity went a yearning of pity as
she witnessed the soft, the hesitant, the delicate unfolding.

For more had come than the tranced gaze. That morning, writing notes,
with Franklin beside her, her hand had inadvertently touched his once or
twice in taking the papers from him, and Helen then had seen that
Franklin blushed. Twice, also, looking up, she had found his eyes fixed
on her with the lover's dwelling tenderness, and both times he had
quickly averted his glance in a manner very new in him.

Helen had pondered deeply in the moments before his departure. Franklin
had never kissed her; the time would come when he must kiss her. The
time would come when a kiss of farewell or greeting must, however rare,
be a facile, marital custom. How would Franklin--trembling on that verge
of a self-recognition that might make a chaos of his life--how and when
would he initiate that custom? How could it be initiated by him at all
unless with an emotion that would not only reveal him to himself, but
make it known to him that he was revealed to her. The revelation, if it
came, must come gradually; they must both have time to get used to it,
she to having a husband she did not love in love with her; he to loving
a wife who would never love him back. She shrank from the thought of
emotional revelations. It was her part to initiate and to make a kiss an
easy thing. Yet she found, sitting there, writing the last notes, with
Franklin beside her, that it was not an easy thing to contemplate. The
thought of her own cowardice spurred her on. When