have said, in his power.  She gave up, let her idea go, let everything go; her one consciousness was that he was taking her again into his arms.  It was not till afterwards that she discriminated as to this; felt how the act operated with him instead of the words he hadn’t uttered—­operated, in his view, as probably better than any words, as always better, in fact, at any time, than anything.  Her acceptance of it, her response to it, inevitable, foredoomed, came back to her, later on, as a virtual assent to the assumption he had thus made that there was really nothing such a demonstration didn’t anticipate and didn’t dispose of, and that the spring acting within herself moreover might well have been, beyond any other, the impulse legitimately to provoke it.  It made, for any issue, the third time since his return that he had drawn her to his breast; and at present, holding her to his side as they left the room, he kept her close for their moving into the hall and across it, kept her for their slow return together to the apartments above.  He had been right, overwhelmingly right, as to the felicity of his tenderness and the degree of her sensibility, but even while she felt these things sweep all others away she tasted of a sort of terror of the weakness they produced in her.  It was still, for her, that she had positively something to do, and that she mustn’t be weak for this, must much rather be strong.  For many hours after, none the less, she remained weak—­if weak it was; though holding fast indeed to the theory of her success, since her agitated overture had been, after all, so unmistakably met.

She recovered soon enough on the whole, the sense that this left her Charlotte always to deal with—­Charlotte who, at any rate, however she might meet overtures, must meet them, at the worst, more or less differently.  Of that inevitability, of such other ranges of response as were open to Charlotte, Maggie took the measure in approaching her, on the morrow of her return from Matcham, with the same show of desire to hear all her story.  She wanted the whole picture from her, as she had wanted it from her companion, and, promptly, in Eaton Square, whither, without the Prince, she repaired, almost ostentatiously, for the purpose, this purpose only, she brought her repeatedly back to the subject, both in her husband’s presence and during several scraps of independent colloquy.  Before her father, instinctively, Maggie took the ground that his wish for interesting echoes would be not less than her own—­allowing, that is, for everything his wife would already have had to tell him, for such passages, between them, as might have occurred since the evening before.  Joining them after luncheon, reaching them, in her desire to proceed with the application of her idea, before they had quitted the breakfast-room, the scene of their mid-day meal, she referred, in her parent’s presence, to what she might have lost by delay, and expressed the hope that there would be an anecdote