to have wished to make the other feel that they were, what they most finally exhaled into the evening air as their eyes mildly met may well have been a kind of helplessness in their felicity.  Their rightness, the justification of everything—­something they so felt the pulse of—­sat there with them; but they might have been asking themselves a little blankly to what further use they could put anything so perfect.  They had created and nursed and established it; they had housed it here in dignity and crowned it with comfort; but mightn’t the moment possibly count for them—­or count at least for us while we watch them with their fate all before them—­as the dawn of the discovery that it doesn’t always meet all contingencies to be right?  Otherwise why should Maggie have found a word of definite doubt—­the expression of the fine pang determined in her a few hours before—­rise after a time to her lips?  She took so for granted moreover her companion’s intelligence of her doubt that the mere vagueness of her question could say it all.  “What is it, after all, that they want to do to you?” “They” were for the Princess too the hovering forces of which Mrs. Rance was the symbol, and her father, only smiling back now, at his ease, took no trouble to appear not to know what she meant.  What she meant—­when once she had spoken—­could come out well enough; though indeed it was nothing, after they had come to the point, that could serve as ground for a great defensive campaign.  The waters of talk spread a little, and Maggie presently contributed an idea in saying:  “What has really happened is that the proportions, for us, are altered.”  He accepted equally, for the time, this somewhat cryptic remark; he still failed to challenge her even when she added that it wouldn’t so much matter if he hadn’t been so terribly young.  He uttered a sound of protest only when she went to declare that she ought as a daughter, in common decency, to have waited.  Yet by that time she was already herself admitting that she should have had to wait long—­if she waited, that is, till he was old.  But there was a way.  “Since you are an irresistible youth, we’ve got to face it.  That, somehow, is what that woman has made me feel.  There’ll be others.”

X

To talk of it thus appeared at last a positive relief to him.  “Yes, there’ll be others.  But you’ll see me through.”

She hesitated.  “Do you mean if you give in?”

“Oh no.  Through my holding out.”

Maggie waited again, but when she spoke it had an effect of abruptness.  “Why should you hold out forever?”