urging her into the carriage was connected
with his feeling that he must take action on the new ground. A certain
ambiguity in her would absolutely have tormented him; but he had already
found something to soothe and correct--as to which she had, on her side,
a shrewd notion of what it would be. She was herself, for that matter,
prepared, and she was, of a truth, as she took her seat in the brougham,
amazed at her preparation. It allowed her scarce an interval; she
brought it straight out.

"I was certain that was what father would say if I should leave him
alone. I HAVE been leaving him alone, and you see the effect. He
hates now to move--he likes too much to be with us. But if you see the
effect"--she felt herself magnificently keeping it up--"perhaps you
don't see the cause. The cause, my dear, is too lovely."

Her husband, on taking his place beside her, had, during a minute or
two, for her watching sense, neither said nor done anything; he had
been, for that sense, as if thinking, waiting, deciding: yet it was
still before he spoke that he, as she felt it to be, definitely
acted. He put his arm round her and drew her close--indulged in the
demonstration, the long, firm embrace by his single arm, the infinite
pressure of her whole person to his own, that such opportunities had so
often suggested and prescribed. Held, accordingly, and, as she could but
too intimately feel, exquisitely solicited, she had said the thing she
was intending and desiring to say, and as to which she felt, even more
than she felt anything else, that whatever he might do she mustn't be
irresponsible. Yes, she was in his exerted grasp, and she knew what
that was; but she was at the same time in the grasp of her conceived
responsibility, and the extraordinary thing was that, of the two
intensities, the second was presently to become the sharper. He took his
time for it meanwhile, but he met her speech after a fashion.

"The cause of your father's deciding not to go?"

"Yes, and of my having wanted to let it act for him quietly--I mean
without my insistence." She had, in her compressed state, another pause,
and it made her feel as if she were immensely resisting. Strange enough
was this sense for her, and altogether new, the sense of possessing, by
miraculous help, some advantage that, absolutely then and there, in the
carriage, as they rolled, she might either give up or keep. Strange,
inexpressibly strange--so distinctly she saw that if she