I
only see how, for so many reasons, we ought to stand toward them--and
how, to do ourselves justice, we do. It represents for us a conscious
care--"

"Of every hour, literally," said Charlotte. She could rise to the
highest measure of the facts. "And for which we must trust each
other--!"

"Oh, as we trust the saints in glory. Fortunately," the Prince hastened
to add, "we can." With which, as for the full assurance and the pledge
it involved, their hands instinctively found their hands. "It's all too
wonderful."

Firmly and gravely she kept his hand. "It's too beautiful."

And so for a minute they stood together, as strongly held and as closely
confronted as any hour of their easier past even had seen them. They
were silent at first, only facing and faced, only grasping and grasped,
only meeting and met. "It's sacred," he said at last.

"It's sacred," she breathed back to him. They vowed it, gave it out and
took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more closely together. Then of
a sudden, through this tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow
strait into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way,
melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their
response and their response their pressure; with a violence that had
sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses
they passionately sealed their pledge.

XIX

He had taken it from her, as we have seen, moreover, that Fanny
Assingham didn't now matter--the "now" he had even himself supplied, as
no more than fair to his sense of various earlier stages; and, though
his assent remained scarce more than tacit, his behaviour, for the hour,
so fell into line that, for many days, he kept postponing the visit he
had promised his old friend on the occasion of their talk at the
Foreign Office. With regret, none the less, would he have seen it quite
extinguished, that theory of their relation as attached pupil and kind
instructress in which they had from the first almost equally found a
convenience. It had been he, no doubt, who had most put it forward,
since his need of knowledge fairly exceeded her mild pretension; but he
had again and again repeated to her that he should never, without her,
have been where he was, and she had not successfully concealed the
pleasure it might give her to believe it, even after the question of
where he was had begun to show itself as rather more close