spense for me, and she can see me
wriggle. But my wriggling doesn't matter," he pursued. "I can bear
it. Besides, I shall wriggle out."

The picture at any rate stirred in her an appreciation that he felt to
be sincere. "I don't see how a man can be kinder to a woman than you
are to me."

Well, kind was what he wanted to be; yet even while her charming eyes
rested on him with the truth of this he none the less had his humour of
honesty. "When I say suspense I mean, you know," he laughed, "suspense
about my own case too!"

"Oh yes--about your own case too!" It diminished his magnanimity, but
she only looked at him the more tenderly.

"Not, however," he went on, "that I want to talk to you about that.
It's my own little affair, and I mentioned it simply as part of Mrs.
Pocock's advantage." No, no; though there was a queer present
temptation in it, and his suspense was so real that to fidget was a
relief, he wouldn't talk to her about Mrs. Newsome, wouldn't work off
on her the anxiety produced in him by Sarah's calculated omissions of
reference. The effect she produced of representing her mother had been
produced--and that was just the immense, the uncanny part of
it--without her having so much as mentioned that lady. She had brought
no message, had alluded to no question, had only answered his enquiries
with hopeless limited propriety. She had invented a way of meeting
them--as if he had been a polite perfunctory poor relation, of distant
degree--that made them almost ridiculous in him. He couldn't moreover
on his own side ask much without appearing to publish how he had lately
lacked news; a circumstance of which it was Sarah's profound policy not
to betray a suspicion. These things, all the same, he wouldn't breathe
to Madame de Vionnet--much as they might make him walk up and down. And
what he didn't say--as well as what SHE didn't, for she had also her
high decencies--enhanced the effect of his being there with her at the
end of ten minutes more intimately on the basis of saving her than he
had yet had occasion to be. It ended in fact by being quite beautiful
between them, the number of things they had a manifest consciousness of
not saying. He would have liked to turn her, critically, to the
subject of Mrs. Pocock, but he so stuck to the line he felt to be the
point of honour and of delicacy that he scarce even asked her what her
personal impression had been. He knew it, for that matter, without
put