with all its
essential colour--that of the so possible identity of her father's
motive and principle with her own. HE was "deep," as Amerigo called it,
so that no vibration of the still air should reach his daughter; just
as she had earned that description by making and by, for that matter,
intending still to make, her care for his serenity, or at any rate
for the firm outer shell of his dignity, all marvellous enamel, her
paramount law. More strangely even than anything else, her husband
seemed to speak now but to help her in this. "I know nothing but what
you tell me."

"Then I've told you all I intended. Find out the rest--!"

"Find it out--?" He waited.

She stood before him a moment--it took that time to go on. Depth upon
depth of her situation, as she met his face, surged and sank within her;
but with the effect somehow, once more, that they rather lifted her than
let her drop. She had her feet somewhere, through it all--it was her
companion, absolutely, who was at sea. And she kept her feet; she
pressed them to what was beneath her. She went over to the bell beside
the chimney and gave a ring that he could but take as a summons for her
maid. It stopped everything for the present; it was an intimation to him
to go and dress. But she had to insist. "Find out for yourself!"

PART FIFTH

XXXV

After the little party was again constituted at Fawns--which had taken,
for completeness, some ten days--Maggie naturally felt herself still
more possessed, in spirit, of everything that had last happened in
London. There was a phrase that came back to her from old American
years: she was having, by that idiom, the time of her life--she knew it
by the perpetual throb of this sense of possession, which was almost
too violent either to recognise or to hide. It was as if she had come
out--that was her most general consciousness; out of a dark tunnel, a
dense wood, or even simply a smoky room, and had thereby, at least,
for going on, the advantage of air in her lungs. It was as if she were
somehow at last gathering in the fruits of patience; she had either been
really more patient than she had known at the time, or had been so for
longer: the change brought about by itself as great a difference of
view as the shift of an inch in the position of a telescope. It was her
telescope in fact that had gained in range--just as her danger lay
in her exposing herself to the observation by the more cha