had then communicated—­so that they were to remain together, for the time, in consequence, quite in the form of a couple of sociable drinkers who sit back from the table over which they have been resting their elbows, over which they have emptied to the last drop their respective charged cups.  The cups were still there on the table, but turned upside down; and nothing was left for the companions but to confirm by placid silences the fact that the wine had been good.  They had parted, positively, as if, on either side, primed with it—­primed for whatever was to be; and everything between them, as the month waned, added its touch of truth to this similitude.  Nothing, truly, was at present between them save that they were looking at each other in infinite trust; it fairly wanted no more words, and when they met, during the deep summer days, met even without witnesses, when they kissed at morning and evening, or on any of the other occasions of contact that they had always so freely celebrated, a pair of birds of the upper air could scarce have appeared less to invite each other to sit down and worry afresh.  So it was that in the house itself, where more of his waiting treasures than ever were provisionally ranged, she sometimes only looked at him—­from end to end of the great gallery, the pride of the house, for instance—­as if, in one of the halls of a museum, she had been an earnest young woman with a Baedeker and he a vague gentleman to whom even Baedekers were unknown.  He had ever, of course, had his way of walking about to review his possessions and verify their condition; but this was a pastime to which he now struck her as almost extravagantly addicted, and when she passed near him and he turned to give her a smile she caught—­or so she fancied—­the greater depth of his small, perpetual hum of contemplation.  It was as if he were singing to himself, sotto voce, as he went—­and it was also, on occasion, quite ineffably, as if Charlotte, hovering, watching, listening, on her side too, kept sufficiently within earshot to make it out as song, and yet, for some reason connected with the very manner of it, stood off and didn’t dare.

One of the attentions she had from immediately after her marriage most freely paid him was that of her interest in his rarities, her appreciation of his taste, her native passion for beautiful objects and her grateful desire not to miss anything he could teach her about them.  Maggie had in due course seen her begin to “work” this fortunately natural source of sympathy for all it was worth.  She took possession of the mound throughout its extent; she abounded, to odd excess, one might have remarked, in the assumption of its being for her, with her husband, all the ground, the finest, clearest air and most breathable medium common to them.  It had been given to Maggie to wonder if she didn’t, in these intensities of approbation, too much shut him up to his province; but this was a complaint he