ith
an effect of abruptness.

The effect, whether intended or not, reached her--brought her face short
round. It was a touch at which she again lost her balance, at which,
somehow, the bottom dropped out of her recovered comfort. "Then
you've made up yours differently? It really struck you that there IS
something?"

The movement itself, apparently, made him once more stand off. He
had felt on his nearer approach the high temperature of the question.
"Perhaps that's just what she's doing: showing him how much she's
letting him alone--pointing it out to him from day to day."

"Did she point it out by waiting for him to-night on the stair-case in
the manner you described to me?"

"I really, my dear, described to you a manner?" the Colonel, clearly,
from want of habit, scarce recognised himself in the imputation.

"Yes--for once in a way; in those few words we had after you had watched
them come up you told me something of what you had seen. You didn't
tell me very much--THAT you couldn't for your life; but I saw for myself
that, strange to say, you had received your impression, and I felt
therefore that there must indeed have been something out of the way for
you so to betray it." She was fully upon him now, and she confronted him
with his proved sensibility to the occasion--confronted him because of
her own uneasy need to profit by it. It came over her still more than at
the time, it came over her that he had been struck with something, even
HE, poor dear man; and that for this to have occurred there must have
been much to be struck with. She tried in fact to corner him, to
pack him insistently down, in the truth of his plain vision, the very
plainness of which was its value; for so recorded, she felt, none of
it would escape--she should have it at hand for reference. "Come, my
dear--you thought what you thought: in the presence of what you saw you
couldn't resist thinking. I don't ask more of it than that. And your
idea is worth, this time, quite as much as any of mine--so that you
can't pretend, as usual, that mine has run away with me. I haven't
caught up with you. I stay where I am. But I see," she concluded, "where
you are, and I'm much obliged to you for letting me. You give me a point
de repere outside myself--which is where I like it. Now I can work round
you."

Their conveyance, as she spoke, stopped at their door, and it was, on
the spot, another fact of value for her that her husband, though seated
on t