n slowly
revolved; he had lighted a cigarette, for final patience, and he seemed
vaguely to "time" her as she moved to and fro. He had at the same time
to do justice to the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was
doubtless by way of expression of this teachability that he let his
eyes, for a minute, roll, as from the force of feeling, over the upper
dusk of the room. He had thought of the response his wife's words
ideally implied.

"Decide to live--ah yes!--for her child."

"Oh, bother her child!"--and he had never felt so snubbed, for an
exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short. "To live, you poor
dear, for her father--which is another pair of sleeves!"

And Mrs. Assingham's whole ample, ornamented person irradiated, with
this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to glow. "Any
idiot can do things for her child. She'll have a motive more original,
and we shall see how it will work her. She'll have to save HIM."

"To 'save' him--?"

"To keep her father from her own knowledge. THAT"--and she seemed to see
it, before her, in her husband's very eyes--"will be work cut out!"
With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their
colloquy. "Good night!"

There was something in her manner, however--or in the effect, at least,
of this supreme demonstration that had fairly, and by a single touch,
lifted him to her side; so that, after she had turned her back to regain
the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to
mount, with the ring of excited perception. "Ah, but, you know, that's
rather jolly!"

"Jolly'--?" she turned upon it, again, at the foot of the staircase.

"I mean it's rather charming."

"'Charming'--?" It had still to be their law, a little, that she was
tragic when he was comic.

"I mean it's rather beautiful. You just said, yourself, it would be.
Only," he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea, and as if it
had suddenly touched with light for him connections hitherto dim--"only
I don't quite see why that very care for him which has carried her to
such other lengths, precisely, as affect one as so 'rum,' hasn't also,
by the same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been going
on."

"Ah, there you are! It's the question that I've all along been asking
myself." She had rested her eyes on the carpet, but she raised them as
she pursued--she let him have it straight. "And it's the question of an
idiot."

"An idiot--?"