my suspicion will be clinched.”  He was watching her lips, spying for the symptoms of the sound; whereby these symptoms had only to fail and he would have got nothing that she didn’t measure out to him as she gave it.  She had presently in fact so recovered herself that she seemed to know she could more easily have made him name his wife than he have made her name her husband.  It was there before her that if she should so much as force him just not consciously to avoid saying “Charlotte, Charlotte” he would have given himself away.  But to be sure of this was enough for her, and she saw more clearly with each lapsing instant what they were both doing.  He was doing what he had steadily been coming to; he was practically offering himself, pressing himself upon her, as a sacrifice—­he had read his way so into her best possibility; and where had she already, for weeks and days past, planted her feet if not on her acceptance of the offer?  Cold indeed, colder and colder she turned, as she felt herself suffer this close personal vision of his attitude still not to make her weaken.  That was her very certitude, the intensity of his pressure; for if something dreadful hadn’t happened there wouldn’t, for either of them, be these dreadful things to do.  She had meanwhile, as well, the immense advantage that she could have named Charlotte without exposing herself—­as, for that matter, she was the next minute showing him.

“Why, I sacrifice you, simply, to everything and to every one.  I take the consequences of your marriage as perfectly natural.”

He threw back his head a little, settling with one hand his eyeglass.  “What do you call, my dear, the consequences?”

“Your life as your marriage has made it.”

“Well, hasn’t it made it exactly what we wanted?” She just hesitated, then felt herself steady—­oh, beyond what she had dreamed.  “Exactly what I wanted—­yes.”

His eyes, through his straightened glasses, were still on hers, and he might, with his intenser fixed smile, have been knowing she was, for herself, rightly inspired.  “What do you make then of what I wanted?”

“I don’t make anything, any more than of what you’ve got.  That’s exactly the point.  I don’t put myself out to do so—­I never have; I take from you all I can get, all you’ve provided for me, and I leave you to make of your own side of the matter what you can.  There you are—­the rest is your own affair.  I don’t even pretend to concern myself—!”

“To concern yourself—?” He watched her as she faintly faltered, looking about her now so as not to keep always meeting his face.

“With what may have really become of you.  It’s as if we had agreed from the first not to go into that—­such an arrangement being of course charming for me.  You can’t say, you know, that I haven’t stuck to it.”

He didn’t say so then—­even with the opportunity given him of her stopping once more to catch her breath.  He said instead:  “Oh, my dear—­oh, oh!”