The equilibrium, the precious condition, lasted in spite of rearrangement; there had been a fresh distribution of the different weights, but the balance persisted and triumphed:  all of which was just the reason why she was forbidden, face to face with the companion of her adventure, the experiment of a test.  If they balanced they balanced—­she had to take that; it deprived her of every pretext for arriving, by however covert a process, at what he thought.

But she had her hours, thus, of feeling supremely linked to him by the rigour of their law, and when it came over her that, all the while, the wish, on his side, to spare her might be what most worked with him, this very fact of their seeming to have nothing “inward” really to talk about wrapped him up for her in a kind of sweetness that was wanting, as a consecration, even in her yearning for her husband.  She was powerless, however, was only more utterly hushed, when the interrupting flash came, when she would have been all ready to say to him, “Yes, this is by every appearance the best time we’ve had yet; but don’t you see, all the same, how they must be working together for it, and how my very success, my success in shifting our beautiful harmony to a new basis, comes round to being their success, above all; their cleverness, their amiability, their power to hold out, their complete possession, in short, of our life?” For how could she say as much as that without saying a great deal more? without saying “They’ll do everything in the world that suits us, save only one thing—­prescribe a line for us that will make them separate.”  How could she so much as imagine herself even faintly murmuring that without putting into his mouth the very words that would have made her quail?  “Separate, my dear?  Do you want them to separate?  Then you want us to—­you and me?  For how can the one separation take place without the other?” That was the question that, in spirit, she had heard him ask—­with its dread train, moreover, of involved and connected inquiries.  Their own separation, his and hers, was of course perfectly thinkable, but only on the basis of the sharpest of reasons.  Well, the sharpest, the very sharpest, would be that they could no longer afford, as it were, he to let his wife, she to let her husband, “run” them in such compact formation.  And say they accepted this account of their situation as a practical finality, acting upon it and proceeding to a division, would no sombre ghosts of the smothered past, on either side, show, across the widening strait, pale unappeased faces, or raise, in the very passage, deprecating, denouncing hands?