While Franklin spoke, it had crossed Helen's mind that perhaps he had determined to follow her suggestion--buy a castle and find a princess to put in it; it had crossed her mind that he might be going to ask her advice on this momentous step--she was used to giving advice on such momentous steps; but when he brought out his final sentence she was so astonished that she rose from her chair and stood before him. She became very white, and, with the strained look that then came to them, her eyes opened widely. And she gazed down at Franklin Winslow Kane while, in three flashes, searing and swift, like running leaps of lightning, three thoughts traversed her mind: Gerald--All that money--A child. It was in this last thought that she seemed, then, to fall crumblingly, like a burnt-out thing reduced to powder. A child. What would it look like, a child of hers and Franklin Kane's? How spare and poor and insignificant were his face and form. Could she love a child who had a nose like that--a neat, flat, sallow little nose? A spasm, half of laughter, half of sobbing, caught her breath. 'I've startled you,' said Franklin, who still sat in his chair looking up at her. 'Please forgive me.' A further thought came to her now, one that she could utter, was able to utter. 'I couldn't live in America. Yes, you did startle me. But I am much honoured.' 'Thank you,' said Franklin. 'I needn't say how much I should consider myself honoured if you would accept my proposal.' He rose now, but it was to move a little further away from her, and, taking up an ornament from the mantelpiece, he examined it while he said: 'As for America, I quite see that; that's what I was really thinking of in what I was saying about London. You are London, and it wouldn't do to take you away from it. I shouldn't think of taking you away. What I would ask you to do would be to take me in. Since being over here, this time, and seeing some of the real life of the country--what it's working towards, what it needs and means--and, moreover, taking into consideration the character of my own work, I should feel perfectly justified in making a compromise between my patriotism and my--my affection for you. Some day you might perhaps find that you'd like to pay us a visit, over there; I think you'd find it interesting, and it wouldn't, of course, be my America that you'd see, not the serious and unfashionable America; it would be a very different America from that that you'd find waiting to welcome you. So that what I should suggest--and feel justified in suggesting--would be that I spent three months alternately in England and America; I should in that way get half a year of home life and half a year of my own country, and be able, perhaps, to be something of a link between the English and American scientific worlds. As for our life here'--Franklin remembered old Miss Buchanan's words--'you should have your own establishments and,' he lifted his eyes to hers, now, and