from loving him with pride.  It came to her, all strangely, as a sudden, an immense relief.  The sense that he wasn’t a failure, and could never be, purged their predicament of every meanness—­ made it as if they had really emerged, in their transmuted union, to smile almost without pain.  It was like a new confidence, and after another instant she knew even still better why.  Wasn’t it because now, also, on his side, he was thinking of her as his daughter, was trying her, during these mute seconds, as the child of his blood?  Oh then, if she wasn’t with her little conscious passion, the child of any weakness, what was she but strong enough too?  It swelled in her, fairly; it raised her higher, higher:  she wasn’t in that case a failure either—­hadn’t been, but the contrary; his strength was her strength, her pride was his, and they were decent and competent together.  This was all in the answer she finally made him.

“I believe in you more than any one.”

“Than any one at all?”

She hesitated, for all it might mean; but there was—­oh a thousand times!—­no doubt of it.  “Than any one at all.”  She kept nothing of it back now, met his eyes over it, let him have the whole of it; after which she went on:  “And that’s the way, I think, you believe in me.”

He looked at her a minute longer, but his tone at last was right.  “About the way—­yes.”

“Well then—?” She spoke as for the end and for other matters—­ for anything, everything, else there might be.  They would never return to it.

“Well then—!” His hands came out, and while her own took them he drew her to his breast and held her.  He held her hard and kept her long, and she let herself go; but it was an embrace that, august and almost stern, produced, for all its intimacy, no revulsion and broke into no inconsequence of tears.

XXXVIII

Maggie was to feel, after this passage, how they had both been helped through it by the influence of that accident of her having been caught, a few nights before, in the familiar embrace of her father’s wife.  His return to the saloon had chanced to coincide exactly with this demonstration, missed moreover neither by her husband nor by the Assinghams, who, their card-party suspended, had quitted the billiard-room with him.  She had been conscious enough at the time of what such an impression, received by the others, might, in that extended state, do for her case; and none the less that, as no one had appeared to wish to be the first to make a remark about it, it had taken on perceptibly the special shade of consecration conferred by unanimities of silence.  The effect, she might have considered, had been almost awkward—­the promptitude of her separation from Charlotte, as if they had been discovered in some absurdity, on her becoming aware of spectators.  The spectators, on the other hand—­that was the appearance—­mightn’t have supposed them, in the existing relation, addicted