. More than that,
there was no question for them. So you see," she concluded, "where that
puts me." She got up, on the words, very much as if they were the blue
daylight towards which, through a darksome tunnel, she had been pushing
her way, and the elation in her voice, combined with her recovered
alertness, might have signified the sharp whistle of the train that
shoots at last into the open. She turned about the room; she looked out
a moment into the August night; she stopped, here and there, before the
flowers in bowls and vases. Yes, it was distinctly as if she had proved
what was needing proof, as if the issue of her operation had been,
almost unexpectedly, a success. Old arithmetic had perhaps been
fallacious, but the new settled the question. Her husband, oddly,
however, kept his place without apparently measuring these results.
As he had been amused at her intensity, so he was not uplifted by her
relief; his interest might in fact have been more enlisted than he
allowed. "Do you mean," he presently asked, "that he had already forgot
about Charlotte?"

She faced round as if he had touched a spring. "He WANTED to,
naturally--and it was much the best thing he could do." She was in
possession of the main case, as it truly seemed; she had it all now. "He
was capable of the effort, and he took the best way. Remember too what
Maggie then seemed to us."

"She's very nice; but she always seems to me, more than anything else,
the young woman who has a million a year. If you mean that that's what
she especially seemed to him, you of course place the thing in your
light. The effort to forget Charlotte couldn't, I grant you, have been
so difficult."

This pulled her up but for an instant. "I never said he didn't from the
first--I never said that he doesn't more and more--like Maggie's money."

"I never said I shouldn't have liked it myself," Bob Assingham returned.
He made no movement; he smoked another minute. "How much did Maggie
know?"

"How much?" She seemed to consider--as if it were between quarts and
gallons--how best to express the quantity. "She knew what Charlotte, in
Florence, had told her."

"And what had Charlotte told her?"

"Very little."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Why, this--that she couldn't tell her." And she explained a little what
she meant. "There are things, my dear--haven't you felt it yourself,
coarse as you are?--that no one could tell Maggie. There are things
that, upon my word, I sh