“But isn’t it a pity,” the Colonel asked, “that they should happen to be the one or two that will be the most disagreeable to her?”

“Oh, ’disagreeable’—?  They’ll have had to be disagreeable—­to show her a little where she is.  They’ll have had to be disagreeable to make her sit up.  They’ll have had to be disagreeable to make her decide to live.”

Bob Assingham was now at the window, while his companion slowly revolved; he had lighted a cigarette, for final patience, and he seemed vaguely to “time” her as she moved to and fro.  He had at the same time to do justice to the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was doubtless by way of expression of this teachability that he let his eyes, for a minute, roll, as from the force of feeling, over the upper dusk of the room.  He had thought of the response his wife’s words ideally implied.

“Decide to live—­ah yes!—­for her child.”

“Oh, bother her child!”—­and he had never felt so snubbed, for an exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short.  “To live, you poor dear, for her father—­which is another pair of sleeves!”

And Mrs. Assingham’s whole ample, ornamented person irradiated, with this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to glow.  “Any idiot can do things for her child.  She’ll have a motive more original, and we shall see how it will work her.  She’ll have to save him.”

“To ‘save’ him—?”

“To keep her father from her own knowledge.  That”—­and she seemed to see it, before her, in her husband’s very eyes—­“will be work cut out!” With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy.  “Good night!”

There was something in her manner, however—­or in the effect, at least, of this supreme demonstration that had fairly, and by a single touch, lifted him to her side; so that, after she had turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the ring of excited perception.  “Ah, but, you know, that’s rather jolly!”

“Jolly’—?” she turned upon it, again, at the foot of the staircase.

“I mean it’s rather charming.”

“’Charming’—?” It had still to be their law, a little, that she was tragic when he was comic.

“I mean it’s rather beautiful.  You just said, yourself, it would be.  Only,” he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea, and as if it had suddenly touched with light for him connections hitherto dim—­“only I don’t quite see why that very care for him which has carried her to such other lengths, precisely, as affect one as so ‘rum,’ hasn’t also, by the same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been going on.”

“Ah, there you are!  It’s the question that I’ve all along been asking myself.”  She had rested her eyes on the carpet, but she raised them as she pursued—­she let him have it straight.  “And it’s the question of an idiot.”