, an immense relief. The sense that he
wasn't a failure, and could never be, purged their predicament of every
meanness--made it as if they had really emerged, in their transmuted
union, to smile almost without pain. It was like a new confidence, and
after another instant she knew even still better why. Wasn't it because
now, also, on his side, he was thinking of her as his daughter, was
TRYING her, during these mute seconds, as the child of his blood? Oh
then, if she wasn't with her little conscious passion, the child of any
weakness, what was she but strong enough too? It swelled in her,
fairly; it raised her higher, higher: she wasn't in that case a failure
either--hadn't been, but the contrary; his strength was her strength,
her pride was his, and they were decent and competent together. This was
all in the answer she finally made him.

"I believe in you more than any one."

"Than any one at all?"

She hesitated, for all it might mean; but there was--oh a thousand
times!--no doubt of it. "Than any one at all." She kept nothing of it
back now, met his eyes over it, let him have the whole of it; after
which she went on: "And that's the way, I think, you believe in me."

He looked at her a minute longer, but his tone at last was right. "About
the way--yes."

"Well then--?" She spoke as for the end and for other matters--for
anything, everything, else there might be. They would never return to
it.

"Well then--!" His hands came out, and while her own took them he drew
her to his breast and held her. He held her hard and kept her long, and
she let herself go; but it was an embrace that, august and almost
stern, produced, for all its intimacy, no revulsion and broke into no
inconsequence of tears.

XXXVIII

Maggie was to feel, after this passage, how they had both been helped
through it by the influence of that accident of her having been caught,
a few nights before, in the familiar embrace of her father's wife.
His return to the saloon had chanced to coincide exactly with this
demonstration, missed moreover neither by her husband nor by
the Assinghams, who, their card-party suspended, had quitted the
billiard-room with him. She had been conscious enough at the time of
what such an impression, received by the others, might, in that extended
state, do for her case; and none the less that, as no one had appeared
to wish to be the first to make a remark about it, it had taken on
perc