Thomas Wingfold. Volume III by George MacDonald

He stopped at the Manor House, for it was only beginning to be late, / to inquire after Leopold. Helen received him with her usual / coldness -- a manner which was in part assumed for self-protection, / for in his presence she always felt rebuked, and which had the / effect of a veil between them to hide from her much of the curate's / character that might otherwise have been intelligible to her. / Leopold, she said, was a little better, but Wingfold walked home / thinking what a happy thing it would be if God were to take him / away.

His interest in Helen deepened and deepened. He could not help / admiring her strength of character even when he saw it spent for / worse than nought; and her devotion to her brother was lovely, / notwithstanding the stains of selfishness that spotted it. Her moral / standard was indeed far from lofty, and as to her spiritual nature, / that as yet appeared nowhere. And yet the growth in her was / marvellous when he thought of what she had seemed before this / trouble came. One evening as he left Leopold, he heard her singing, / and stood on the stair to listen. And to listen was to marvel. For / her voice, instead of being hard and dry, as when he heard it / before, was, without any loss of elasticity, now liquid and / mellifluous, and full of feeling. Its tones were borne along like / the leaves on the wild west wind of Shelley's sonnet. And the / longing of the curate to help her from that moment took a fresh / departure, and grew and grew. But as the hours and days and weeks / passed, and the longing found no outlet, it turned to an almost / hopeless brooding upon the face and the form, yea the heart and soul / of the woman he so fain would help, until ere long he loved her with / the passion of a man mingled with the compassion of a prophet. He / saw that something had to be done IN her -- perhaps that some saving / shock in the guise of ruin had to visit her; that some door had to / be burst open, some roof blown away, some rock blasted, that light / and air might have free course through her soul's house, without / which that soul could never grow stately like the house it / inhabited.