of his presence.  These things had been testimony, after all, to supersede any other, for on the spot, even while she looked, the warmly-washing wave had travelled far up the strand.  She had subsequently lived, for hours she couldn’t count, under the dizzying, smothering welter positively in submarine depths where everything came to her through walls of emerald and mother-of-pearl; though indeed she had got her head above them, for breath, when face to face with Charlotte again, on the morrow, in Eaton Square.  Meanwhile, none the less, as was so apparent, the prior, the prime impression had remained, in the manner of a spying servant, on the other side of the barred threshold; a witness availing himself, in time, of the lightest pretext to re-enter.  It was as if he had found this pretext in her observed necessity of comparing—­comparing the obvious common elements in her husband’s and her stepmother’s ways of now “taking” her.  With or without her witness, at any rate, she was led by comparison to a sense of the quantity of earnest intention operating, and operating so harmoniously, between her companions; and it was in the mitigated midnight of these approximations that she had made out the promise of her dawn.

It was a worked-out scheme for their not wounding her, for their behaving to her quite nobly; to which each had, in some winning way, induced the other to contribute, and which therefore, so far as that went, proved that she had become with them a subject of intimate study.  Quickly, quickly, on a certain alarm taken, eagerly and anxiously, before they should, without knowing it, wound her, they had signalled from house to house their clever idea, the idea by which, for all these days, her own idea had been profiting.  They had built her in with their purpose—­which was why, above her, a vault seemed more heavily to arch; so that she sat there, in the solid chamber of her helplessness, as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of which she could but just manage to see by stretching her neck.  Baths of benevolence were very well, but, at least, unless one were a patient of some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one was usually not so immersed save by one’s request.  It wasn’t in the least what she had requested.  She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired flight, not merely as a plea for a more gilded cage and an extra allowance of lumps of sugar.  Above all she hadn’t complained, not by the quaver of a syllable—­so what wound in particular had she shown her fear of receiving?  What wound had she received—­as to which she had exchanged the least word with them?  If she had ever whined or moped they might have had some reason; but she would be hanged—­she conversed with herself in strong language—­if she had been, from beginning to end, anything but pliable and mild.  It all came back, in consequence, to some required process of their own, a process operating, quite positively, as a precaution and a policy.