or two left for her to pick up.  Charlotte was dressed to go out, and her husband, it appeared, rather positively prepared not to; he had left the table, but was seated near the fire with two or three of the morning papers and the residuum of the second and third posts on a stand beside him—­more even than the usual extravagance, as Maggie’s glance made out, of circulars, catalogues, advertisements, announcements of sales, foreign envelopes and foreign handwritings that were as unmistakable as foreign clothes.  Charlotte, at the window, looking into the side-street that abutted on the Square, might have been watching for their visitor’s advent before withdrawing; and in the light, strange and coloured, like that of a painted picture, which fixed the impression for her, objects took on values not hitherto so fully shown.  It was the effect of her quickened sensibility; she knew herself again in presence of a problem, in need of a solution for which she must intensely work:  that consciousness, lately born in her, had been taught the evening before to accept a temporary lapse, but had quickly enough again, with her getting out of her own house and her walking across half the town—­for she had come from Portland Place on foot—­found breath still in its lungs.

It exhaled this breath in a sigh, faint and unheard; her tribute, while she stood there before speaking, to realities looming through the golden mist that had already begun to be scattered.  The conditions facing her had yielded, for the time, to the golden mist—­had considerably melted away; but there they were again, definite, and it was for the next quarter of an hour as if she could have counted them one by one on her fingers.  Sharp to her above all was the renewed attestation of her father’s comprehensive acceptances, which she had so long regarded as of the same quality with her own, but which, so distinctly now, she should have the complication of being obliged to deal with separately.  They had not yet struck her as absolutely extraordinary—­which had made for her lumping them with her own, since her view of her own had but so lately begun to change; though it instantly stood out for her that there was really no new judgment of them she should be able to show without attracting in some degree his attention, without perhaps exciting his surprise and making thereby, for the situation she shared with him, some difference.  She was reminded and warned by the concrete image; and for a minute Charlotte’s face, immediately presented to her, affected her as searching her own to see the reminder tell.  She had not less promptly kissed her stepmother, and then had bent over her father, from behind, and laid her cheek upon him; little amenities tantamount heretofore to an easy change of guard—­Charlotte’s own frequent, though always cheerful, term of comparison for this process of transfer.  Maggie figured thus as the relieving sentry, and so smoothly did use and custom work for them that her mate might even, on this occasion,