Franklin rose at last,
gave her his hand, said that he'd come back that evening, Helen rose
too, resolved. 'Good-bye,' she said. 'Don't forget the tickets for that
concert.'

'No, indeed,' said Franklin.

'And I think, don't you? that we might put the announcement in the
papers to-morrow. Aunt Grizel wants, I am sure, to see me safely Morning
Posted.'

'So do I,' smiled Franklin.

Helen was summoning her courage. 'Good-bye,' she repeated, and now she
smiled with a new sweetness. 'I think we ought to kiss each other
good-bye, don't you? We are such an old engaged couple.'

Resolved, and firm in her resolve, though knowing commotion of soul, she
leaned to him and kissed his forehead and turned her cheek to him.
Franklin had kept her hand, and in the pause, where she did not see his
face, she felt his tighten on it; but he did not kiss her. Smiling a
little nervously, she raised her head and looked at him. He was gazing
at her with a shaken, stricken look.

'You must kiss me good-bye,' said Helen, speaking as she would have
spoken to a departing child. 'Why, we have no right to be put in the
_Morning Post_ unless we've given each other a kiss.'

And, really like the child, Franklin said: 'Must I?'

He kissed her then, gently, and spoke no further word. But she knew,
when he had gone, and when thinking over the meaning of his face as it
only came to her when the daze of her own daring faded and left her able
to think, that she had hardly helped Franklin over a difficulty; she had
made him aware of it rather; she had shown him what his task must be.
And it could not reassure her, for Franklin, that his face, after that
stricken moment, and with a wonderful swiftness of delicacy, had
promised her that it should be accomplished. It promised her that there
should be no emotions, or, if there were, that they should be mastered
ones; it promised her that she should see nothing in him to make her
feel that she was refusing anything, nothing to make her feel that she
was giving pain by a refusal. It seemed to say that he knew, now, at
last, what the burden was that he laid upon her and that it should be as
light as he could make it. It did not show her that he saw his own
burden; but Helen saw it for him. She, too, made herself promises as she
stood after his departure, taking a long breath over her discovery; she
was not afraid in looking forward. All that she was afraid of--and it
was of this that she was thinking as s