did I tell you of him?" he asked, rejoicing, as they
started: a question for all answer to which, before she took his arm,
the girl thrust her paper, crumpled, into the pocket of her coat.

PART THIRD

XIV

Charlotte, half way up the "monumental" staircase, had begun by waiting
alone--waiting to be rejoined by her companion, who had gone down all
the way, as in common kindness bound, and who, his duty performed, would
know where to find her. She was meanwhile, though extremely apparent,
not perhaps absolutely advertised; but she would not have cared if she
had been--so little was it, by this time, her first occasion of facing
society with a consciousness materially, with a confidence quite
splendidly, enriched. For a couple of years now she had known as never
before what it was to look "well"--to look, that is, as well as she had
always felt, from far back, that, in certain conditions, she might.
On such an evening as this, that of a great official party in the
full flush of the London spring-time, the conditions affected her, her
nerves, her senses, her imagination, as all profusely present; so that
perhaps at no moment yet had she been so justified of her faith as at
the particular instant of our being again concerned with her, that of
her chancing to glance higher up from where she stood and meeting in
consequence the quiet eyes of Colonel Assingham, who had his elbows on
the broad balustrade of the great gallery overhanging the staircase and
who immediately exchanged with her one of his most artlessly familiar
signals. This simplicity of his visual attention struck her, even with
the other things she had to think about, as the quietest note in the
whole high pitch--much, in fact, as if she had pressed a finger on a
chord or a key and created, for the number of seconds, an arrest of
vibration, a more muffled thump. The sight of him suggested indeed that
Fanny would be there, though so far as opportunity went she had not seen
her. This was about the limit of what it could suggest.

The air, however, had suggestions enough--it abounded in them, many of
them precisely helping to constitute those conditions with which, for
our young woman, the hour was brilliantly crowned. She was herself in
truth crowned, and it all hung together, melted together, in light and
colour and sound: the unsurpassed diamonds that her head so happily
carried, the other jewels, the other perfections of aspec