ive you his last evening in England?"

This, for Maggie, was more difficult to meet; yet she was still not
without her stop-gap. "That may be what they'll propose--that we shall
go somewhere together, the four of us, for a celebration--except that,
to round it thoroughly off, we ought also to have Fanny and the Colonel.
They don't WANT them at tea, she quite sufficiently expresses; they
polish them off, poor dears, they get rid of them, beforehand. They want
only us together; and if they cut us down to tea," she continued, "as
they cut Fanny and the Colonel down to luncheon, perhaps it's for the
fancy, after all, of their keeping their last night in London for each
other."

She said these things as they came to her; she was unable to keep them
back, even though, as she heard herself, she might have been throwing
everything to the winds. But wasn't that the right way--for sharing his
last day of captivity with the man one adored? It was every moment more
and more for her as if she were waiting with him in his prison--waiting
with some gleam of remembrance of how noble captives in the French
Revolution, the darkness of the Terror, used to make a feast, or a
high discourse, of their last poor resources. If she had broken with
everything now, every observance of all the past months, she must simply
then take it so--take it that what she had worked for was too near,
at last, to let her keep her head. She might have been losing her head
verily in her husband's eyes--since he didn't know, all the while, that
the sudden freedom of her words was but the diverted intensity of her
disposition personally to seize him. He didn't know, either, that this
was her manner--now she was with him--of beguiling audaciously the
supremacy of suspense. For the people of the French Revolution,
assuredly, there wasn't suspense; the scaffold, for those she was
thinking of, was certain--whereas what Charlotte's telegram announced
was, short of some incalculable error, clear liberation. Just the
point, however, was in its being clearer to herself than to him; her
clearnesses, clearances--those she had so all but abjectly laboured
for--threatened to crowd upon her in the form of one of the clusters
of angelic heads, the peopled shafts of light beating down through iron
bars, that regale, on occasion, precisely, the fevered vision of those
who are in chains. She was going to know, she felt, later on--was going
to know with compunction, doubtless, on