the same fear was, on either side, in the silent look she and Amerigo had exchanged.  The happy balance that demanded this amount of consideration was truly thus, as by its own confession, a delicate matter; but that her husband had also his habit of anxiety and his general caution only brought them, after all, more closely together.  It would have been most beautifully, therefore, in the name of the equilibrium, and in that of her joy at their feeling so exactly the same about it, that she might have spoken if she had permitted the truth on the subject of her behaviour to ring out—­on the subject of that poor little behaviour which was for the moment so very limited a case of eccentricity.

“‘Why, why’ have I made this evening such a point of our not all dining together?  Well, because I’ve all day been so wanting you alone that I finally couldn’t bear it, and that there didn’t seem any great reason why I should try to.  That came to me—­funny as it may at first sound, with all the things we’ve so wonderfully got into the way of bearing for each other.  You’ve seemed these last days—­I don’t know what:  more absent than ever before, too absent for us merely to go on so.  It’s all very well, and I perfectly see how beautiful it is, all round; but there comes a day when something snaps, when the full cup, filled to the very brim, begins to flow over.  That’s what has happened to my need of you—­the cup, all day, has been too full to carry.  So here I am with it, spilling it over you—­and just for the reason that is the reason of my life.  After all, I’ve scarcely to explain that I’m as much in love with you now as the first hour; except that there are some hours—­which I know when they come, because they almost frighten me—­that show me I’m even more so.  They come of themselves—­and, ah, they’ve been coming!  After all, after all—!” Some such words as those were what didn’t ring out, yet it was as if even the unuttered sound had been quenched here in its own quaver.  It was where utterance would have broken down by its very weight if he had let it get so far.  Without that extremity, at the end of a moment, he had taken in what he needed to take—­that his wife was testifying, that she adored and missed and desired him.  “After all, after all,” since she put it so, she was right.  That was what he had to respond to; that was what, from the moment that, as has been said, he “saw,” he had to treat as the most pertinent thing possible.  He held her close and long, in expression of their personal reunion—­this, obviously, was one way of doing so.  He rubbed his cheek, tenderly, and with a deep vague murmur, against her face, that side of her face she was not pressing to his breast.  That was, not less obviously, another way, and there were ways enough, in short, for his extemporised ease, for the good humour she was afterwards to find herself thinking of as his infinite tact.  This last was partly, no doubt, because the question of tact might