“Wait in Paris.  That will be charming in itself.”

“You take me to pleasant places.”  She turned it over.  “You propose to me beautiful things.”

“It rests but with you to make them beautiful and pleasant.  You’ve made Brighton—!”

“Ah!”—­she almost tenderly protested.  “With what I’m doing now?”

“You’re promising me now what I want.  Aren’t you promising me,” he pressed, getting up, “aren’t you promising me to abide by what Maggie says?”

Oh, she wanted to be sure she was.  “Do you mean she’ll ask it of me?”

It gave him indeed, as by communication, a sense of the propriety of being himself certain.  Yet what was he but certain?  “She’ll speak to you.  She’ll speak to you for me.”

This at last then seemed to satisfy her.  “Very good.  May we wait again to talk of it till she has done so?” He showed, with his hands down in his pockets and his shoulders expressively up, a certain disappointment.  Soon enough, none the less, his gentleness was all back and his patience once more exemplary.  “Of course I give you time.  Especially,” he smiled, “as it’s time that I shall be spending with you.  Our keeping on together will help you perhaps to see.  To see, I mean, how I need you.”

“I already see,” said Charlotte, “how you’ve persuaded yourself you do.”  But she had to repeat it.  “That isn’t, unfortunately, all.”

“Well then, how you’ll make Maggie right.”

“’Right’?” She echoed it as if the word went far.  And “O—­oh!” she still critically murmured as they moved together away.

XIII

He had talked to her of their waiting in Paris, a week later, but on the spot there this period of patience suffered no great strain.  He had written to his daughter, not indeed from Brighton, but directly after their return to Fawns, where they spent only forty-eight hours before resuming their journey; and Maggie’s reply to his news was a telegram from Rome, delivered to him at noon of their fourth day and which he brought out to Charlotte, who was seated at that moment in the court of the hotel, where they had agreed that he should join her for their proceeding together to the noontide meal.  His letter, at Fawns—­a letter of several pages and intended lucidly, unreservedly, in fact all but triumphantly, to inform—­had proved, on his sitting down to it, and a little to his surprise, not quite so simple a document to frame as even his due consciousness of its weight of meaning had allowed him to assume:  this doubtless, however, only for reasons naturally latent in the very wealth of that consciousness, which contributed to his message something of their own quality of impatience.  The main result of their talk, for the time, had been a difference in his relation to his young friend, as well as a difference, equally sensible, in her relation to himself; and this in spite of his not having again renewed his undertaking to “speak” to her so far even as to tell her of the communication despatched to Rome.  Delicacy, a delicacy more beautiful still, all the delicacy she should want, reigned between them—­it being rudimentary, in their actual order, that she mustn’t be further worried until Maggie should have put her at her ease.