e good faith."

"Good faith?"--he echoed the words, which had in fact something of an
odd ring, critically.

"Their false position. It comes to the same thing." And she bore down,
with her decision, the superficial lack of sequence. "They may very
possibly, for a demonstration--as I see them--not have come back."

He wondered, visibly, at this, how she did see them. "May have bolted
somewhere together?"

"May have stayed over at Matcham itself till tomorrow. May have
wired home, each of them, since Maggie left me. May have done," Fanny
Assingham continued, "God knows what!" She went on, suddenly, with more
emotion--which, at the pressure of some spring of her inner vision,
broke out in a wail of distress, imperfectly smothered. "Whatever
they've done I shall never know. Never, never--because I don't want to,
and because nothing will induce me. So they may do as they like.
But I've worked for them ALL" She uttered this last with another
irrepressible quaver, and the next moment her tears had come, though she
had, with the explosion, quitted her husband as if to hide it from him.
She passed into the dusky drawing-room, where, during his own prowl,
shortly previous, he had drawn up a blind, so that the light of the
street-lamps came in a little at the window. She made for this
window, against which she leaned her head, while the Colonel, with his
lengthened face, looked after her for a minute and hesitated. He might
have been wondering what she had really done, to what extent, beyond his
knowledge or his conception, in the affairs of these people, she COULD
have committed herself. But to hear her cry, and yet try not to, was,
quickly enough, too much for him; he had known her at other times quite
not try not to, and that had not been so bad. He went to her and put his
arm round her; he drew her head to his breast, where, while she gasped,
she let it stay a little--all with a patience that presently stilled
her. Yet the effect of this small crisis, oddly enough, was not to close
their colloquy, with the natural result of sending them to bed: what was
between them had opened out further, had somehow, through the sharp
show of her feeling, taken a positive stride, had entered, as it were,
without more words, the region of the understood, shutting the door
after it and bringing them so still more nearly face to face. They
remained for some minutes looking at it through the dim window which
opened upon the world of human tr