Had he begun to love her when she met his eye after her mishap on the tower?
He had simply thought her weak.

Had he grown to love her whilst standing on the lawn brightened all over by the evening sun?
He had thought her complexion good: no more.

Was it her conversation that had sown the seed?
He had thought her words ingenious, and very creditable to a young woman, but not noteworthy.

Had the chess-playing anything to do with it?
Certainly not: he had thought her at that time a rather conceited child.
Knight's experience was a complete disproof of the assumption that love always comes by glances of the eye and sympathetic touches of the fingers: that, like flame, it makes itself palpable at the moment of generation.

Not till they were parted, and she had become sublimated in his memory, could he be said to have even attentively regarded her.
Thus, having passively gathered up images of her which his mind did not act upon till the cause of them was no longer before him, he appeared to himself to have fallen in love with her soul, which had temporarily assumed its disembodiment to accompany him on his way.
She began to rule him so imperiously now that, accustomed to analysis, he almost trembled at the possible result of the introduction of this new force among the nicely adjusted ones of his ordinary life.