as from a sudden shake, her reserve proved an inadequate
vessel. She could bear her own, her private reference to the weight on
her mind, but the touch of another hand made it too horribly press. "Oh,
I deny responsibility--to YOU. So far as I ever had it I've done with
it."

He had been, all the while, beautifully smiling; but she made his look,
now, penetrate her again more. "As to whom then do you confess it?"

"Ah, mio caro, that's--if to anyone--my own business!"

He continued to look at her hard. "You give me up then?"

It was what Charlotte had asked her ten minutes before, and its coming
from him so much in the same way shook her in her place. She was on the
point of replying "Do you and she agree together for what you'll say
to me?"--but she was glad afterwards to have checked herself in time,
little as her actual answer had perhaps bettered it. "I think I don't
know what to make of you."

"You must receive me at least," he said.

"Oh, please, not till I'm ready for you!"--and, though she found a laugh
for it, she had to turn away. She had never turned away from him before,
and it was quite positively for her as if she were altogether afraid of
him.

XVI

Later on, when their hired brougham had, with the long vociferation that
tormented her impatience, been extricated from the endless rank, she
rolled into the London night, beside her husband, as into a sheltering
darkness where she could muffle herself and draw breath. She had stood
for the previous half-hour in a merciless glare, beaten upon, stared out
of countenance, it fairly seemed to her, by intimations of her mistake.
For what she was most immediately feeling was that she had, in the past,
been active, for these people, to ends that were now bearing fruit and
that might yet bear a larger crop. She but brooded, at first, in her
corner of the carriage: it was like burying her exposed face, a face too
helplessly exposed, in the cool lap of the common indifference, of the
dispeopled streets, of the closed shops and darkened houses seen
through the window of the brougham, a world mercifully unconscious
and unreproachful. It wouldn't, like the world she had just left, know
sooner or later what she had done, or would know it, at least, only if
the final consequence should be some quite overwhelming publicity. She
fixed this possibility itself so hard, however, for a few moments, that
the misery of her fear produced t