door of the room. He knew at the same time, none the
less, that she knew still more than he--in the sense, that is, of all
the signs and portents that might count for them; and his vision
of alternative--she could scarce say what to call them, solutions,
satisfactions--opened out, altogether, with this tangible truth of her
attitude by the chimney-place, the way she looked at him as through the
gained advantage of it; her right hand resting on the marble and her
left keeping her skirt from the fire while she held out a foot to dry.
He couldn't have told what particular links and gaps had at the end of
a few minutes found themselves renewed and bridged; for he remembered
no occasion, in Rome, from which the picture could have been so exactly
copied. He remembered, that is, none of her coming to see him in the
rain while a muddy four-wheeler waited, and while, though having
left her waterproof downstairs, she was yet invested with the odd
eloquence--the positive picturesqueness, yes, given all the rest of the
matter--of a dull dress and a black Bowdlerised hat that seemed to make
a point of insisting on their time of life and their moral intention,
the hat's and the frock's own, as well as on the irony of indifference
to them practically playing in her so handsome rain-freshened face. The
sense of the past revived for him nevertheless as it had not yet done:
it made that other time somehow meet the future close, interlocking with
it, before his watching eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips,
and so handling and hustling the present that this poor quantity scarce
retained substance enough, scarce remained sufficiently THERE, to be
wounded or shocked.

What had happened, in short, was that Charlotte and he had, by a single
turn of the wrist of fate--"led up" to indeed, no doubt, by steps and
stages that conscious computation had missed--been placed face to face
in a freedom that partook, extraordinarily, of ideal perfection, since
the magic web had spun itself without their toil, almost without their
touch. Above all, on this occasion, once more, there sounded through
their safety, as an undertone, the very voice he had listened to on the
eve of his marriage with such another sort of unrest. Dimly, again and
again, from that period on, he had seemed to hear it tell him why it
kept recurring; but it phrased the large music now in a way that filled
the room. The reason was--into which he had lived, quite intimately, by