ion. He
stayed moreover--THAT was really the sign of the hour--in spite of the
nervous unrest that had brought him and that had in truth much rather
fed on the scepticism by which she had apparently meant to soothe it.
She had not soothed him, and there arrived, remarkably, a moment when
the cause of her failure gleamed out. He had not frightened her, as she
called it--he felt that; yet she was herself not at ease. She had been
nervous, though trying to disguise it; the sight of him, following
on the announcement of his name, had shown her as disconcerted. This
conviction, for the young man, deepened and sharpened; yet with the
effect, too, of making him glad in spite of it. It was as if, in
calling, he had done even better than he intended. For it was somehow
IMPORTANT--that was what it was--that there should be at this hour
something the matter with Mrs. Assingham, with whom, in all their
acquaintance, so considerable now, there had never been the least little
thing the matter. To wait thus and watch for it was to know, of a truth,
that there was something the matter with HIM; since strangely, with so
little to go upon--his heart had positively begun to beat to the tune
of suspense. It fairly befell at last, for a climax, that they almost
ceased to pretend--to pretend, that is, to cheat each other with forms.
The unspoken had come up, and there was a crisis--neither could have
said how long it lasted--during which they were reduced, for all
interchange, to looking at each other on quite an inordinate scale. They
might at this moment, in their positively portentous stillness, have
been keeping it up for a wager, sitting for their photograph or even
enacting a tableau-vivant.

The spectator of whom they would thus well have been worthy might have
read meanings of his own into the intensity of their communion--or
indeed, even without meanings, have found his account, aesthetically,
in some gratified play of our modern sense of type, so scantly to be
distinguished from our modern sense of beauty. Type was there, at the
worst, in Mrs. Assingham's dark, neat head, on which the crisp black
hair made waves so fine and so numerous that she looked even more in the
fashion of the hour than she desired. Full of discriminations against
the obvious, she had yet to accept a flagrant appearance and to make the
best of misleading signs. Her richness of hue, her generous nose, her
eyebrows marked like those of an actress--these things,