“It’s sacred,” she breathed back to him.  They vowed it, gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more closely together.  Then of a sudden, through this tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow strait into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled.  Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and their response their pressure; with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately sealed their pledge.

XIX

He had taken it from her, as we have seen, moreover, that Fanny Assingham didn’t now matter—­the “now” he had even himself supplied, as no more than fair to his sense of various earlier stages; and, though his assent remained scarce more than tacit, his behaviour, for the hour, so fell into line that, for many days, he kept postponing the visit he had promised his old friend on the occasion of their talk at the Foreign Office.  With regret, none the less, would he have seen it quite extinguished, that theory of their relation as attached pupil and kind instructress in which they had from the first almost equally found a convenience.  It had been he, no doubt, who had most put it forward, since his need of knowledge fairly exceeded her mild pretension; but he had again and again repeated to her that he should never, without her, have been where he was, and she had not successfully concealed the pleasure it might give her to believe it, even after the question of where he was had begun to show itself as rather more closed than open to interpretation.  It had never indeed, before that evening, come up as during the passage at the official party, and he had for the first time at those moments, a little disappointedly, got the impression of a certain failure, on the dear woman’s part, of something he was aware of having always rather freely taken for granted in her.  Of what exactly the failure consisted he would still perhaps have felt it a little harsh to try to say; and if she had in fact, as by Charlotte’s observation, “broken down,” the details of the collapse would be comparatively unimportant.  They came to the same thing, all such collapses—­the failure of courage, the failure of friendship, or the failure just simply of tact; for didn’t any one of them by itself amount really to the failure of wit?—­which was the last thing he had expected of her and which would be but another name for the triumph of stupidity.  It had been Charlotte’s remark that they were at last “beyond” her; whereas he had ever enjoyed believing that a certain easy imagination in her would keep up with him to the end.  He shrank from affixing a label to Mrs. Assingham’s want of faith; but when he thought, at his ease, of the way persons who were capable really entertained—­or at least with any refinement—­the passion of personal loyalty, he figured for them a play of fancy neither timorous nor scrupulous.  So would his personal