Trenton Warren knows her better than this. His sense is far finer, his insight far keener, than his friend's, and while he has apparently stood aloof from any attempt at intimate acquaintance with Helen, and has been sufficiently sparing of her praises in her husband's ears, he has brought all his sense and keenness to bear upon the dissection of her character, and has arrived at a far different estimate of her mental power. Constant secret study of her tells him that, if she is not exactly clever, she has an immense fund of common sense, determination, and patience--tells him also another thing, the thought of which sends the blood into his pale cheeks, and causes his heart to throb with exultation. Helen Griswold, this pattern wife, so decorous, so much respected, so universally looked up to, holds her husband in highest esteem, in most affectionate appreciation, but of love for him.--of love, be it understood, in the sense of passion--she has, according to Warren's idea, not one whit. Such love the placid easy-going absorbed man of business--so much her elder too, with his petting parental way--was not one to kindle; and yet such love, if Warren were any judge, was as necessary to her as air to light or heat to flame. He had watched her carefully, and he read the necessity for it in the occasional wearied expression which came across the lustrous depths of her dark eyes, in a certain unsatisfied restlessness which from time to time she betrayed; he imagined he had discovered her craving for love of a distinct kind from that which her husband bestowed on her, and in this discovery he found hopes for his own future success. For this man, outwardly cold, self-possessed, and reticent, so far as Helen Griswold was concerned, was the slave of a passion, violent, unreasonable, unconquerable. He struggled against it for a time, fearing the probable trouble, the danger it would cause him; and when finally he found resistance to it impossible he determined that by her alone should its existence be known. All his apparent insensibility to Helen's charms, all his studied depreciation of Griswold's enthusiasm about his wife, were caused by what he felt to be the imperative necessity of keeping his passion hidden until the time should arrive for declaring it to its object, and to her alone.