of the master and the manager, the commandant and the
rate-payer; then he came back to his wife, before whom, for a moment, he
stood waiting. But she herself, for a time, continued to wait, only
looking up at him inscrutably. There was in these minor manoeuvres and
conscious patiences something of a suspension of their old custom of
divergent discussion, that intercourse by misunderstanding which had
grown so clumsy now. This familiar pleasantry seemed to desire to show
it could yield, on occasion, to any clear trouble; though it was also
sensibly, and just incoherently, in the air that no trouble was at
present to be vulgarly recognised as clear.

There might, for that matter, even have been in Mr. Assingham's face a
mild perception of some finer sense--a sense for his wife's situation,
and the very situation she was, oddly enough, about to repudiate--that
she had fairly caused to grow in him. But it was a flower to breathe
upon gently, and this was very much what she finally did. She knew he
needed no telling that she had given herself, all the afternoon, to her
friends in Eaton Square, and that her doing so would have been but
the prompt result of impressions gathered, in quantities, in brimming
baskets, like the purple grapes of the vintage, at Matcham; a process
surrounded by him, while it so unmistakably went on, with abstentions
and discretions that might almost have counted as solemnities. The
solemnities, at the same time, had committed him to nothing--to nothing
beyond this confession itself of a consciousness of deep waters. She had
been out on these waters, for him, visibly; and his tribute to the fact
had been his keeping her, even if without a word, well in sight. He had
not quitted for an hour, during her adventure, the shore of the mystic
lake; he had on the contrary stationed himself where she could signal
to him at need. Her need would have arisen if the planks of her bark had
parted--THEN some sort of plunge would have become his immediate duty.
His present position, clearly, was that of seeing her in the centre of
her sheet of dark water, and of wondering if her actual mute gaze at him
didn't perhaps mean that her planks WERE now parting. He held himself
so ready that it was quite as if the inward man had pulled off coat and
waistcoat. Before he had plunged, however--that is before he had uttered
a question--he perceived, not without relief, that she was making for
land. He watched her steadily paddle