Maggie waited; she looked, as her companion had done a moment before, at the two books on the seat; she put them together and laid them down; then she made up her mind.  “I’ve failed!” she sounded out before Charlotte, having given her time, walked away.  She watched her, splendid and erect, float down the long vista; then she sank upon a seat.  Yes, she had done all.

PART SIXTH.

XL

“I’ll do anything you like,” she said to her husband on one of the last days of the month, “if our being here, this way at this time, seems to you too absurd, or too uncomfortable, or too impossible.  We’ll either take leave of them now, without waiting—­or we’ll come back in time, three days before they start.  I’ll go abroad with you, if you but say the word; to Switzerland, the Tyrol, the Italian Alps, to whichever of your old high places you would like most to see again—­those beautiful ones that used to do you good after Rome and that you so often told me about.”

Where they were, in the conditions that prompted this offer, and where it might indeed appear ridiculous that, with the stale London September close at hand, they should content themselves with remaining, was where the desert of Portland Place looked blank as it had never looked, and where a drowsy cabman, scanning the horizon for a fare, could sink to oblivion of the risks of immobility.  But Amerigo was of the odd opinion, day after day, that their situation couldn’t be bettered; and he even went at no moment through the form of replying that, should their ordeal strike her as exceeding their patience, any step they might take would be for her own relief.  This was, no doubt, partly because he stood out so wonderfully, to the end, against admitting, by a weak word at least, that any element of their existence was, or ever had been, an ordeal; no trap of circumstance, no lapse of “form,” no accident of irritation, had landed him in that inconsequence.  His wife might verily have suggested that he was consequent—­consequent with the admirable appearance he had from the first so undertaken, and so continued, to present—­rather too rigidly at her expense; only, as it happened, she was not the little person to do anything of the sort, and the strange tacit compact actually in operation between them might have been founded on an intelligent comparison, a definite collation positively, of the kinds of patience proper to each.  She was seeing him through—­he had engaged to come out at the right end if she would see him:  this understanding, tacitly renewed from week to week, had fairly received, with the procession of the weeks, the consecration of time; but it scarce needed to be insisted on that she was seeing him on his terms, not all on hers, or that, in other words, she must allow him his unexplained and uncharted, his one practicably workable way.  If that way, by one of the intimate