ght be met. The way in which it might
be met was by his putting his child at peace, and the way to put her at
peace was to provide for his future--that is for hers--by marriage, by
a marriage as good, speaking proportionately, as hers had been. As he
fairly inhaled this measure of refreshment he tasted the meaning of
recent agitations. He had seen that Charlotte could contribute--what he
hadn't seen was what she could contribute TO. When it had all supremely
cleared up and he had simply settled this service to his daughter well
before him as the proper direction of his young friend's leisure, the
cool darkness had again closed round him, but his moral lucidity was
constituted. It wasn't only moreover that the word, with a click, so
fitted the riddle, but that the riddle, in such perfection, fitted
the word. He might have been equally in want and yet not have had his
remedy. Oh, if Charlotte didn't accept him, of course the remedy would
fail; but, as everything had fallen together, it was at least there to
be tried. And success would be great--that was his last throb--if the
measure of relief effected for Maggie should at all prove to have been
given by his own actual sense of felicity. He really didn't know when in
his life he had thought of anything happier. To think of it merely for
himself would have been, even as he had just lately felt, even doing
all justice to that condition--yes, impossible. But there was a grand
difference in thinking of it for his child.

XII

It was at Brighton, above all, that this difference came out; it was
during the three wonderful days he spent there with Charlotte that he
had acquainted himself further--though doubtless not even now quite
completely--with the merits of his majestic scheme. And while, moreover,
to begin with, he still but held his vision in place, steadying it
fairly with his hands, as he had often steadied, for inspection, a
precarious old pot or kept a glazed picture in its right relation to
the light, the other, the outer presumptions in his favour, those
independent of what he might himself contribute and that therefore, till
he should "speak," remained necessarily vague--that quantity, I say,
struck him as positively multiplying, as putting on, in the fresh
Brighton air and on the sunny Brighton front, a kind of tempting
palpability. He liked, in this preliminary stage, to feel that he should
be able to "speak" and that he would; t