into the evening air as their eyes mildly
met may well have been a kind of helplessness in their felicity. Their
rightness, the justification of everything--something they so felt
the pulse of--sat there with them; but they might have been asking
themselves a little blankly to what further use they could put anything
so perfect. They had created and nursed and established it; they had
housed it here in dignity and crowned it with comfort; but mightn't the
moment possibly count for them--or count at least for us while we watch
them with their fate all before them--as the dawn of the discovery that
it doesn't always meet ALL contingencies to be right? Otherwise why
should Maggie have found a word of definite doubt--the expression of the
fine pang determined in her a few hours before--rise after a time to her
lips? She took so for granted moreover her companion's intelligence
of her doubt that the mere vagueness of her question could say it all.
"What is it, after all, that they want to do to you?" "They" were for
the Princess too the hovering forces of which Mrs. Rance was the symbol,
and her father, only smiling back now, at his ease, took no trouble to
appear not to know what she meant. What she meant--when once she had
spoken--could come out well enough; though indeed it was nothing, after
they had come to the point, that could serve as ground for a great
defensive campaign. The waters of talk spread a little, and Maggie
presently contributed an idea in saying: "What has really happened is
that the proportions, for us, are altered." He accepted equally, for
the time, this somewhat cryptic remark; he still failed to challenge her
even when she added that it wouldn't so much matter if he hadn't been
so terribly young. He uttered a sound of protest only when she went to
declare that she ought as a daughter, in common decency, to have waited.
Yet by that time she was already herself admitting that she should have
had to wait long--if she waited, that is, till he was old. But there was
a way. "Since you ARE an irresistible youth, we've got to face it. That,
somehow, is what that woman has made me feel. There'll be others."

X

To talk of it thus appeared at last a positive relief to him. "Yes,
there'll be others. But you'll see me through."

She hesitated. "Do you mean if you give in?"

"Oh no. Through my holding out."

Maggie waited again, but when she spoke it had an effect of abruptn