life then," he almost fiercely asked, "anything
but a father?" But he went on before she could answer. "You talk about
differences, but they've been already made--as no one knows better than
Maggie. She feels the one she made herself by her own marriage--made, I
mean, for me. She constantly thinks of it--it allows her no rest. To put
her at peace is therefore," he explained, "what I'm trying, with you,
to do. I can't do it alone, but I can do it with your help. You can make
her," he said, "positively happy about me."

"About you?" she thoughtfully echoed. "But what can I make her about
herself?"

"Oh, if she's at ease about me the rest will take care of itself. The
case," he declared, "is in your hands. You'll effectually put out of her
mind that I feel she has abandoned me."

Interest certainly now was what he had kindled in her face, but it was
all the more honourable to her, as he had just called it that she should
want to see each of the steps of his conviction. "If you've been driven
to the 'likes' of me, mayn't it show that you've felt truly forsaken?"

"Well, I'm willing to suggest that, if I can show at the same time that
I feel consoled."

"But HAVE you," she demanded, "really felt so?" He hesitated.

"Consoled?"

"Forsaken."

"No--I haven't. But if it's her idea--!" If it was her idea, in short,
that was enough. This enunciation of motive, the next moment, however,
sounded to him perhaps slightly thin, so that he gave it another touch.
"That is if it's my idea. I happen, you see, to like my idea."

"Well, it's beautiful and wonderful. But isn't it, possibly," Charlotte
asked, "not quite enough to marry me for?"

"Why so, my dear child? Isn't a man's idea usually what he does marry
for?"

Charlotte, considering, looked as if this might perhaps be a large
question, or at all events something of an extension of one they were
immediately concerned with. "Doesn't that a good deal depend on the sort
of thing it may be?" She suggested that, about marriage, ideas, as he
called them, might differ; with which, however, giving no more time to
it, she sounded another question. "Don't you appear rather to put it to
me that I may accept your offer for Maggie's sake? Somehow"--she turned
it over--"I don't so clearly SEE her quite so much finding reassurance,
or even quite so much needing it."

"Do you then make nothing at all of her having been so ready to leave
us?"

Ah, Charlotte on the contrary made much!