Her silence seemed to characterise this statement as superficial, and her thoughts, as always in her husband’s company, pursued an independent course.  He made her, when they were together, talk, but as if for some other person; who was in fact for the most part herself.  Yet she addressed herself with him as she could never have done without him.  “He has behaved beautifully—­he did from the first.  I’ve thought it, all along, wonderful of him; and I’ve more than once, when I’ve had a chance, told him so.  Therefore, therefore—!” But it died away as she mused.

“Therefore he has a right, for a change, to kick up his heels?”

“It isn’t a question, of course, however,” she undivertedly went on, “of their behaving beautifully apart.  It’s a question of their doing as they should when together—­which is another matter.”

“And how do you think then,” the Colonel asked with interest, “that, when together, they should do?  The less they do, one would say, the better—­if you see so much in it.”

His wife, at this, appeared to hear him.  “I don’t see in it what you’d see.  And don’t, my dear,” she further answered, “think it necessary to be horrid or low about them.  They’re the last people, really, to make anything of that sort come in right.”

“I’m surely never horrid or low,” he returned, “about anyone but my extravagant wife.  I can do with all our friends—­as I see them myself:  what I can’t do with is the figures you make of them.  And when you take to adding your figures up—!” But he exhaled it again in smoke.

“My additions don’t matter when you’ve not to pay the bill.”  With which her meditation again bore her through the air.  “The great thing was that when it so suddenly came up for her he wasn’t afraid.  If he had been afraid he could perfectly have prevented it.  And if I had seen he was—­if I hadn’t seen he wasn’t—­so,” said Mrs. Assingham, “could I. So,” she declared, “Would I. It’s perfectly true,” she went on—­“it was too good a thing for her, such a chance in life, not to be accepted.  And I liked his not keeping her out of it merely from a fear of his own nature.  It was so wonderful it should come to her.  The only thing would have been if Charlotte herself couldn’t have faced it.  Then, if she had not had confidence, we might have talked.  But she had it to any amount.”

“Did you ask her how much?” Bob Assingham patiently inquired.

He had put the question with no more than his usual modest hope of reward, but he had pressed, this time, the sharpest spring of response.  “Never, never—­it wasn’t a time to ‘ask.’  Asking is suggesting—­and it wasn’t a time to suggest.  One had to make up one’s mind, as quietly as possible, by what one could judge.  And I judge, as I say, that Charlotte felt she could face it.  For which she struck me at the time as—­for so proud a creature—­ almost touchingly grateful.  The thing I should never forgive her for would be her forgetting to whom it is her thanks have remained most due.”