hat was he but certain? "She'll speak to
you. She'll speak to you FOR me."

This at last then seemed to satisfy her. "Very good. May we wait again
to talk of it till she has done so?" He showed, with his hands down in
his pockets and his shoulders expressively up, a certain disappointment.
Soon enough, none the less, his gentleness was all back and his patience
once more exemplary. "Of course I give you time. Especially," he smiled,
"as it's time that I shall be spending with you. Our keeping on together
will help you perhaps to see. To see, I mean, how I need you."

"I already see," said Charlotte, "how you've persuaded yourself you do."
But she had to repeat it. "That isn't, unfortunately, all."

"Well then, how you'll make Maggie right."

"'Right'?" She echoed it as if the word went far. And "O--oh!" she still
critically murmured as they moved together away.

XIII

He had talked to her of their waiting in Paris, a week later, but on
the spot there this period of patience suffered no great strain. He had
written to his daughter, not indeed from Brighton, but directly after
their return to Fawns, where they spent only forty-eight hours before
resuming their journey; and Maggie's reply to his news was a telegram
from Rome, delivered to him at noon of their fourth day and which he
brought out to Charlotte, who was seated at that moment in the court
of the hotel, where they had agreed that he should join her for their
proceeding together to the noontide meal. His letter, at Fawns--a letter
of several pages and intended lucidly, unreservedly, in fact all but
triumphantly, to inform--had proved, on his sitting down to it, and a
little to his surprise, not quite so simple a document to frame as
even his due consciousness of its weight of meaning had allowed him to
assume: this doubtless, however, only for reasons naturally latent in
the very wealth of that consciousness, which contributed to his message
something of their own quality of impatience. The main result of their
talk, for the time, had been a difference in his relation to his young
friend, as well as a difference, equally sensible, in her relation
to himself; and this in spite of his not having again renewed his
undertaking to "speak" to her so far even as to tell her of the
communication despatched to Rome. Delicacy, a delicacy more beautiful
still, all the delicacy she should want, reigned between them--it being
rudimentary,