what she had intended.  It was in fact even at the moment not absent from her view that he might easily have made an abject fool of her—­at least for the time.  She had indeed, for just ten seconds, been afraid of some such turn:  the uncertainty in his face had become so, the next thing, an uncertainty in the very air.  Three words of impatience the least bit loud, some outbreak of “What in the world are you ‘up to’, and what do you mean?” any note of that sort would instantly have brought her low—­and this all the more that heaven knew she hadn’t in any manner designed to be high.  It was such a trifle, her small breach with custom, or at any rate with his natural presumption, that all magnitude of wonder had already had, before one could deprecate the shadow of it, the effect of a complication.  It had made for him some difference that she couldn’t measure, this meeting him at home and alone instead of elsewhere and with others, and back and back it kept coming to her that the blankness he showed her before he was able to see might, should she choose to insist on it, have a meaning—­have, as who should say, an historic value—­ beyond the importance of momentary expressions in general.  She had naturally had on the spot no ready notion of what he might want to see; it was enough for a ready notion, not to speak of a beating heart, that he did see, that he saw his wife in her own drawing-room at the hour when she would most properly be there.  He hadn’t in any way challenged her, it was true, and, after those instants during which she now believed him to have been harbouring the impression of something unusually prepared and pointed in her attitude and array, he had advanced upon her smiling and smiling, and thus, without hesitation at the last, had taken her into his arms.  The hesitation had been at the first, and she at present saw that he had surmounted it without her help.  She had given him no help; for if, on the one hand, she couldn’t speak for hesitation, so on the other—­and especially as he didn’t ask her—­she couldn’t explain why she was agitated.  She had known it all the while down to her toes, known it in his presence with fresh intensity, and if he had uttered but a question it would have pressed in her the spring of recklessness.  It had been strange that the most natural thing of all to say to him should have had that appearance; but she was more than ever conscious that any appearance she had would come round, more or less straight, to her father, whose life was now so quiet, on the basis accepted for it, that any alteration of his consciousness even in the possible sense of enlivenment, would make their precious equilibrium waver.  That was at the bottom of her mind, that their equilibrium was everything, and that it was practically precarious, a matter of a hair’s breadth for the loss of the balance.  It was the equilibrium, or at all events her conscious fear about it, that had brought her heart into her mouth; and