“Why, you’ve more ways of being kind than anyone I ever knew.”

“Take it then,” he answered, “that I’m simply putting them all together for you.”  She looked at him, on this, long again—­still as if it shouldn’t be said she hadn’t given him time or had withdrawn from his view, so to speak, a single inch of her surface.  This at least she was fully to have exposed.  It represented her as oddly conscientious, and he scarce knew in what sense it affected him.  On the whole, however, with admiration.  “You’re very, very honourable.”

“It’s just what I want to be.  I don’t see,” she added, “why you’re not right, I don’t see why you’re not happy, as you are.  I can not ask myself, I can not ask you,” she went on, “if you’re really as much at liberty as your universal generosity leads you to assume.  Oughtn’t we,” she asked, “to think a little of others?  Oughtn’t I, at least, in loyalty—­at any rate in delicacy—­to think of Maggie?” With which, intensely gentle, so as not to appear too much to teach him his duty, she explained.  “She’s everything to you—­she has always been.  Are you so certain that there’s room in your life—?”

“For another daughter?—­is that what you mean?” She had not hung upon it long, but he had quickly taken her up.

He had not, however, disconcerted her.  “For another young woman—­ very much of her age, and whose relation to her has always been so different from what our marrying would make it.  For another companion,” said Charlotte Stant.

“Can’t a man be, all his life then,” he almost fiercely asked, “anything but a father?” But he went on before she could answer.  “You talk about differences, but they’ve been already made—­as no one knows better than Maggie.  She feels the one she made herself by her own marriage—­made, I mean, for me.  She constantly thinks of it—­it allows her no rest.  To put her at peace is therefore,” he explained, “what I’m trying, with you, to do.  I can’t do it alone, but I can do it with your help.  You can make her,” he said, “positively happy about me.”

“About you?” she thoughtfully echoed.  “But what can I make her about herself?”

“Oh, if she’s at ease about me the rest will take care of itself.  The case,” he declared, “is in your hands.  You’ll effectually put out of her mind that I feel she has abandoned me.”

Interest certainly now was what he had kindled in her face, but it was all the more honourable to her, as he had just called it that she should want to see each of the steps of his conviction.  “If you’ve been driven to the ‘likes’ of me, mayn’t it show that you’ve felt truly forsaken?”

“Well, I’m willing to suggest that, if I can show at the same time that I feel consoled.”

“But have you,” she demanded, “really felt so?” He hesitated.

“Consoled?”

“Forsaken.”

“No—­I haven’t.  But if it’s her idea—!” If it was her idea, in short, that was enough.  This enunciation of motive, the next moment, however, sounded to him perhaps slightly thin, so that he gave it another touch.  “That is if it’s my idea.  I happen, you see, to like my idea.”