It was as if he then knew, on the spot, why he had been feeling, for hours, as he had felt—­as if he in fact knew, within the minute, things he had not known even while she was panting, as from the effect of the staircase, at the door of the room.  He knew at the same time, none the less, that she knew still more than he—­in the sense, that is, of all the signs and portents that might count for them; and his vision of alternative—­she could scarce say what to call them, solutions, satisfactions—­ opened out, altogether, with this tangible truth of her attitude by the chimney-place, the way she looked at him as through the gained advantage of it; her right hand resting on the marble and her left keeping her skirt from the fire while she held out a foot to dry.  He couldn’t have told what particular links and gaps had at the end of a few minutes found themselves renewed and bridged; for he remembered no occasion, in Rome, from which the picture could have been so exactly copied.  He remembered, that is, none of her coming to see him in the rain while a muddy four-wheeler waited, and while, though having left her waterproof downstairs, she was yet invested with the odd eloquence—­the positive picturesqueness, yes, given all the rest of the matter—­ of a dull dress and a black Bowdlerised hat that seemed to make a point of insisting on their time of life and their moral intention, the hat’s and the frock’s own, as well as on the irony of indifference to them practically playing in her so handsome rain-freshened face.  The sense of the past revived for him nevertheless as it had not yet done:  it made that other time somehow meet the future close, interlocking with it, before his watching eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips, and so handling and hustling the present that this poor quantity scarce retained substance enough, scarce remained sufficiently there, to be wounded or shocked.

What had happened, in short, was that Charlotte and he had, by a single turn of the wrist of fate—­“led up” to indeed, no doubt, by steps and stages that conscious computation had missed—­been placed face to face in a freedom that partook, extraordinarily, of ideal perfection, since the magic web had spun itself without their toil, almost without their touch.  Above all, on this occasion, once more, there sounded through their safety, as an undertone, the very voice he had listened to on the eve of his marriage with such another sort of unrest.  Dimly, again and again, from that period on, he had seemed to hear it tell him why it kept recurring; but it phrased the large music now in a way that filled the room.  The reason was—­into which he had lived, quite intimately, by the end of a quarter-of-an-hour—­that just this truth of their safety offered it now a kind of unexampled receptacle, letting it spread and spread, but at the same time elastically enclosing it, banking it in, for softness, as with billows of eiderdown.  On that morning; in the Park there had been, however