be felt as having come up at the end of a quarter of an hour during which he had liberally talked and she had genially questioned.  He had told her of his day, the happy thought of his roundabout journey with Charlotte, all their cathedral-hunting adventure, and how it had turned out rather more of an affair than they expected.  The moral of it was, at any rate, that he was tired, verily, and must have a bath and dress—­to which end she would kindly excuse him for the shortest time possible.  She was to remember afterwards something that had passed between them on this—­how he had looked, for her, during an instant, at the door, before going out, how he had met her asking him, in hesitation first, then quickly in decision, whether she couldn’t help him by going up with him.  He had perhaps also for a moment hesitated, but he had declined her offer, and she was to preserve, as I say, the memory of the smile with which he had opined that at that rate they wouldn’t dine till ten o’clock and that he should go straighter and faster alone.  Such things, as I say, were to come back to her—­they played, through her full after-sense, like lights on the whole impression; the subsequent parts of the experience were not to have blurred their distinctness.  One of these subsequent parts, the first, had been the not inconsiderable length, to her later and more analytic consciousness, of this second wait for her husband’s reappearance.  She might certainly, with the best will in the world, had she gone up with him, have been more in his way than not, since people could really, almost always, hurry better without help than with it.  Still, she could actually hardly have made him take more time than he struck her taking, though it must indeed be added that there was now in this much-thinking little person’s state of mind no mere crudity of impatience.  Something had happened, rapidly, with the beautiful sight of him and with the drop of her fear of having annoyed him by making him go to and fro.  Subsidence of the fearsome, for Maggie’s spirit, was always, at first, positive emergence of the sweet, and it was long since anything had been so sweet to her as the particular quality suddenly given by her present emotion to the sense of possession.

XXVI

Amerigo was away from her again, as she sat there, as she walked there without him—­for she had, with the difference of his presence in the house, ceased to keep herself from moving about; but the hour was filled nevertheless with the effect of his nearness, and above all with the effect, strange in an intimacy so established, of an almost renewed vision of the facts of his aspect.  She had seen him last but five days since, yet he had stood there before her as if restored from some far country, some long voyage, some combination of dangers or fatigues.  This unquenchable variety in his appeal to her interest, what did it mean but that—­reduced to the flatness of mere statement—­she was married,