chief from a window. "It's awfully sweet of you, darling--our
going together would be charming. But you mustn't mind us--you must
suit yourselves we've settled, Amerigo and I, to stay over till after
luncheon."

Amerigo, with the chink of this gold in his ear, turned straight away,
so as not to be instantly appealed to; and for the very emotion of the
wonder, furthermore, of what divination may achieve when winged by a
community of passion. Charlotte had uttered the exact plea that he had
been keeping ready for the same foreseen necessity, and had uttered
it simply as a consequence of their deepening unexpressed need of each
other and without the passing between them of a word. He hadn't, God
knew, to take it from her--he was too conscious of what he wanted; but
the lesson for him was in the straight clear tone that Charlotte could
thus distil, in the perfect felicity of her adding no explanation, no
touch for plausibility, that she wasn't strictly obliged to add, and
in the truly superior way in which women, so situated, express
and distinguish themselves. She had answered Mrs. Assingham quite
adequately; she had not spoiled it by a reason a scrap larger than the
smallest that would serve, and she had, above all, thrown off, for his
stretched but covered attention, an image that flashed like a mirror
played at the face of the sun. The measure of EVERYTHING, to all his
sense, at these moments, was in it--the measure especially of the
thought that had been growing with him a positive obsession and that
began to throb as never yet under this brush of her having, by perfect
parity of imagination, the match for it. His whole consciousness had by
this time begun almost to ache with a truth of an exquisite order,
at the glow of which she too had, so unmistakably then, been warming
herself--the truth that the occasion constituted by the last few days
couldn't possibly, save by some poverty of their own, refuse them some
still other and still greater beauty. It had already told them, with
an hourly voice, that it had a meaning--a meaning that their associated
sense was to drain even as thirsty lips, after the plough through the
sands and the sight, afar, of the palm-cluster, might drink in at last
the promised well in the desert. There had been beauty, day after day,
and there had been, for the spiritual lips, something of the pervasive
taste of it; yet it was all, none the less, as if their response had
remained below their fo