its
very weight if he had let it get so far. Without that extremity, at the
end of a moment, he had taken in what he needed to take--that his wife
was TESTIFYING, that she adored and missed and desired him. "After all,
after all," since she put it so, she was right. That was what he had to
respond to; that was what, from the moment that, as has been said, he
"saw," he had to treat as the most pertinent thing possible. He held
her close and long, in expression of their personal reunion--this,
obviously, was one way of doing so. He rubbed his cheek, tenderly, and
with a deep vague murmur, against her face, that side of her face she
was not pressing to his breast. That was, not less obviously, another
way, and there were ways enough, in short, for his extemporised ease,
for the good humour she was afterwards to find herself thinking of as
his infinite tact. This last was partly, no doubt, because the question
of tact might be felt as having come up at the end of a quarter of
an hour during which he had liberally talked and she had genially
questioned. He had told her of his day, the happy thought of his
roundabout journey with Charlotte, all their cathedral-hunting
adventure, and how it had turned out rather more of an affair than they
expected. The moral of it was, at any rate, that he was tired, verily,
and must have a bath and dress--to which end she would kindly excuse him
for the shortest time possible. She was to remember afterwards something
that had passed between them on this--how he had looked, for her, during
an instant, at the door, before going out, how he had met her asking
him, in hesitation first, then quickly in decision, whether she
couldn't help him by going up with him. He had perhaps also for a moment
hesitated, but he had declined her offer, and she was to preserve, as I
say, the memory of the smile with which he had opined that at that rate
they wouldn't dine till ten o'clock and that he should go straighter
and faster alone. Such things, as I say, were to come back to her--they
played, through her full after-sense, like lights on the whole
impression; the subsequent parts of the experience were not to have
blurred their distinctness. One of these subsequent parts, the first,
had been the not inconsiderable length, to her later and more analytic
consciousness, of this second wait for her husband's reappearance. She
might certainly, with the best will in the world, had she gone up with
him, have been