morning, she would arrange that it
shouldn't be, as it had been the day before, the same as mine. I really
caught in her attitude a world of invidious reference to the little
journey we had already made together. She had sympathies, she had
proprieties that imposed themselves, and I was not to think that any
little journey was to be thought of again in those conditions. It came
over me that this might have been quite a matter discussed by her,
discussed and settled, with her interlocutor on the sofa. It came over
me that if, before our break-up for the night, I should happen also to
have a minute's talk with that interlocutor, I would equally get from it
the sense of an intention unfavourable to our departing in the same
group. And I wondered if this, in that case, wouldn't affect me as
marking a change back to Long's old manner--a forfeiture of the
conditions, whatever view might be taken of them, that had made him, at
Paddington, suddenly show himself as so possible and so pleasant. If
_he_ "changed back," wouldn't Grace Brissenden change by the same law?
And if Grace Brissenden did, wouldn't her husband? Wouldn't the miracle
take the form of the rejuvenation of that husband? Would it, still by
the same token, take the form of _her_ becoming very old, becoming if
not as old as her husband, at least as old, as one might say, as
herself? Would it take the form of her becoming dreadfully plain--plain
with the plainness of mere stout maturity and artificial preservation?
And if it took this form for the others, which would it take for May
Server? Would she, at a bound as marked as theirs, recover her presence
of mind and her lost equipment?

The kind of suspense that these rising questions produced for me
suffered naturally no drop after Mrs. Briss had cut everything short by
rustling voluminously away. She had something to say to me, and yet she
hadn't; she had nothing to say, and yet I felt her to have already
launched herself in a statement. There were other persons I had made
uncomfortable without at all intending it, but she at least had not
suffered from me, and I had no wish that she should; according to which
she had no pressure to fear. My suspense, in spite of this,
remained--indeed all the more sensibly that I had suddenly lost my
discomfort on the subject of redeeming my pledge to her. It had somehow
left me at a stroke, my dread of her calling me, as by our agreement, to
submit in respect to what we had talke