from generous
rigour of conscience.

These allowances of his spirit were, all the same, consistent with a
great gladness at the sight of the term of his ordeal; for it was the
end of his seeming to agree that questions and doubts had a place. The
more he had inwardly turned the matter over the more it had struck him
that they had in truth only an ugliness. What he could have best borne,
as he now believed, would have been Charlotte's simply saying to him
that she didn't like him enough. This he wouldn't have enjoyed, but he
would quite have understood it and been able ruefully to submit. She
did like him enough--nothing to contradict that had come out for him; so
that he was restless for her as well as for himself. She looked at him
hard a moment when he handed her his telegram, and the look, for what
he fancied a dim, shy fear in it, gave him perhaps his best moment of
conviction that--as a man, so to speak--he properly pleased her. He said
nothing--the words sufficiently did it for him, doing it again better
still as Charlotte, who had left her chair at his approach, murmured
them out. "We start to-night to bring you all our love and joy and
sympathy." There they were, the words, and what did she want more? She
didn't, however, as she gave him back the little unfolded leaf, say
they were enough--though he saw, the next moment, that her silence was
probably not disconnected from her having just visibly turned pale.
Her extraordinarily fine eyes, as it was his present theory that he had
always thought them, shone at him the more darkly out of this change
of colour; and she had again, with it, her apparent way of subjecting
herself, for explicit honesty and through her willingness to face him,
to any view he might take, all at his ease, and even to wantonness, of
the condition he produced in her. As soon as he perceived that emotion
kept her soundless he knew himself deeply touched, since it proved that,
little as she professed, she had been beautifully hoping. They stood
there a minute while he took in from this sign that, yes then, certainly
she liked him enough--liked him enough to make him, old as he was ready
to brand himself, flush for the pleasure of it. The pleasure of it
accordingly made him speak first. "Do you begin, a little, to be
satisfied?"

Still, however, she had to think. "We've hurried them, you see. Why so
breathless a start?"

"Because they want to congratulate us. They want," said Adam Verver, "t