She hesitated, yet she lightly enough provided her answer.  “That we must certainly ask them.  It will be easy for you.  But of course they’re immensely taken—!”

He wondered.  “So immensely taken that they can’t—­that your father can’t—­give you his last evening in England?”

This, for Maggie, was more difficult to meet; yet she was still not without her stop-gap.  “That may be what they’ll propose—­that we shall go somewhere together, the four of us, for a celebration—­except that, to round it thoroughly off, we ought also to have Fanny and the Colonel.  They don’t want them at tea, she quite sufficiently expresses; they polish them off, poor dears, they get rid of them, beforehand.  They want only us together; and if they cut us down to tea,” she continued, “as they cut Fanny and the Colonel down to luncheon, perhaps it’s for the fancy, after all, of their keeping their last night in London for each other.”

She said these things as they came to her; she was unable to keep them back, even though, as she heard herself, she might have been throwing everything to the winds.  But wasn’t that the right way—­ for sharing his last day of captivity with the man one adored?  It was every moment more and more for her as if she were waiting with him in his prison—­waiting with some gleam of remembrance of how noble captives in the French Revolution, the darkness of the Terror, used to make a feast, or a high discourse, of their last poor resources.  If she had broken with everything now, every observance of all the past months, she must simply then take it so—­take it that what she had worked for was too near, at last, to let her keep her head.  She might have been losing her head verily in her husband’s eyes—­since he didn’t know, all the while, that the sudden freedom of her words was but the diverted intensity of her disposition personally to seize him.  He didn’t know, either, that this was her manner—­now she was with him—­of beguiling audaciously the supremacy of suspense.  For the people of the French Revolution, assuredly, there wasn’t suspense; the scaffold, for those she was thinking of, was certain—­whereas what Charlotte’s telegram announced was, short of some incalculable error, clear liberation.  Just the point, however, was in its being clearer to herself than to him; her clearnesses, clearances—­those she had so all but abjectly laboured for—­ threatened to crowd upon her in the form of one of the clusters of angelic heads, the peopled shafts of light beating down through iron bars, that regale, on occasion, precisely, the fevered vision of those who are in chains.  She was going to know, she felt, later on—­was going to know with compunction, doubtless, on the very morrow, how thumpingly her heart had beaten at this foretaste of their being left together:  she should judge at leisure the surrender she was making to the consciousness of complications about to be bodily lifted.  She should judge at leisure