But though Mrs. Pasmer laughed and joked; he was aware of her meaning business—­business in the nicest sort of a way, but business after all, and he liked her for it.  He was glad to be explicit about his hopes and plans, and told what his circumstances were so fully that Mrs. Pasmer, whom his frankness gratified and amused, felt obliged to say that she had not meant to ask so much about his affairs, and he must excuse her if she had seemed to do so.  She had her own belief that Mavering would understand, but she did not mind that.  She said that, of course, till his own family had been consulted, it must not be considered seriously—­that Mr. Pasmer insisted upon that point; and when Dan vehemently asserted the acquiescence of his family beforehand, and urged his father’s admiration for Alice in proof, she reminded him that his mother was to be considered, and put Mr. Pasmer’s scruples forward as her own reason for obduracy.  In her husband’s presence she attributed to him, with his silent assent, all sorts of reluctances and delicate compunctions; she gave him the importance which would have been naturally a husband’s due in such an affair, and ingratiated herself more and more with the young man.  She ignored Mr. Pasmer’s withdrawal when it took place, after a certain lapse of time, and as the moment had come for that, she began to let herself go.  She especially approved of the idea of going abroad and confessed her disappointment with her present experiment of America, where it appeared there was no leisure class of men sufficiently large to satisfy the social needs of Mr. Pasmer’s nature, and she told Dan that he might expect them in Europe before long.  Perhaps they might all three meet him there.  At this he betrayed so clearly that he now intended his going to Europe merely as a sequel to his marrying Alice, while he affected to fall in with all Mrs. Pasmer said, that she grew fonder than ever of him for his ardour and his futile duplicity.  If it had been in Dan’s mind to take part in the rite, Mrs. Pasmer was quite ready at this point to embrace him with motherly tenderness.  Her tough little heart was really in her throat with sympathy when she made an errand for the photograph of an English vicarage, which they had hired the summer of the year before, and she sent Alice back with it alone.

It seemed so long since they had met that the change in Alice did not strike him as strange or as too rapidly operated.  They met with the fervour natural after such a separation, and she did not so much assume as resume possession of him.  It was charming to have her do it, to have her act as if they had always been engaged, to have her try to press down the cowlick that started capriciously across his crown, and to straighten his necktie, and then to drop beside him on the sofa; it thrilled and awed him; and he silently worshipped the superior composure which her sex has in such matters.  Whatever was the provisional interpretation which her father and mother pretended