It had never occurred to his wife to pronounce him ingenuous, but there came at last a high dim August dawn when she couldn’t sleep and when, creeping restlessly about and breathing at her window the coolness of wooded acres, she found the faint flush of the east march with the perception of that other almost equal prodigy.  It rosily coloured her vision that—­even such as he was, yes—­her husband could on occasion sin by excess of candour.  He wouldn’t otherwise have given as his reason for going up to Portland Place in the August days that he was arranging books there.  He had bought a great many of late, and he had had others, a large number, sent from Rome—­wonders of old print in which her father had been interested.  But when her imagination tracked him to the dusty town, to the house where drawn blinds and pale shrouds, where a caretaker and a kitchenmaid were alone in possession, it wasn’t to see him, in his shirtsleeves, unpacking battered boxes.

She saw him, in truth, less easily beguiled—­saw him wander, in the closed dusky rooms, from place to place, or else, for long periods, recline on deep sofas and stare before him through the smoke of ceaseless cigarettes.  She made him out as liking better than anything in the world just now to be alone with his thoughts.  Being herself connected with his thoughts, she continued to believe, more than she had ever been, it was thereby a good deal as if he were alone with her.  She made him out as resting so from that constant strain of the perfunctory to which he was exposed at Fawns; and she was accessible to the impression of the almost beggared aspect of this alternative.  It was like his doing penance in sordid ways—­being sent to prison or being kept without money; it wouldn’t have taken much to make her think of him as really kept without food.  He might have broken away, might easily have started to travel; he had a right—­thought wonderful Maggie now—­to so many more freedoms than he took!  His secret was of course that at Fawns he all the while winced, was all the while in presences in respect to which he had thrown himself back, with a hard pressure, on whatever mysteries of pride, whatever inward springs familiar to the man of the world, he could keep from snapping.  Maggie, for some reason, had that morning, while she watched the sunrise, taken an extraordinary measure of the ground on which he would have had to snatch at pretexts for absence.  It all came to her there—­he got off to escape from a sound.  The sound was in her own ears still—­that of Charlotte’s high coerced quaver before the cabinets in the hushed gallery; the voice by which she herself had been pierced the day before as by that of a creature in anguish and by which, while she sought refuge at the blurred window, the tears had been forced into her eyes.  Her comprehension soared so high that the wonder for her became really his not feeling the need of wider intervals and thicker walls.  Before that admiration