ere with her sentient self, only
the fact of his reappearance and the plenitude of his presence. These
things had been testimony, after all, to supersede any other, for on the
spot, even while she looked, the warmly-washing wave had travelled far
up the strand. She had subsequently lived, for hours she couldn't count,
under the dizzying, smothering welter positively in submarine
depths where everything came to her through walls of emerald and
mother-of-pearl; though indeed she had got her head above them, for
breath, when face to face with Charlotte again, on the morrow, in Eaton
Square. Meanwhile, none the less, as was so apparent, the prior, the
prime impression had remained, in the manner of a spying servant, on the
other side of the barred threshold; a witness availing himself, in time,
of the lightest pretext to re-enter. It was as if he had found this
pretext in her observed necessity of comparing--comparing the obvious
common elements in her husband's and her stepmother's ways of now
"taking" her. With or without her witness, at any rate, she was led by
comparison to a sense of the quantity of earnest intention operating,
and operating so harmoniously, between her companions; and it was in
the mitigated midnight of these approximations that she had made out the
promise of her dawn.

It was a worked-out scheme for their not wounding her, for their
behaving to her quite nobly; to which each had, in some winning way,
induced the other to contribute, and which therefore, so far as that
went, proved that she had become with them a subject of intimate study.
Quickly, quickly, on a certain alarm taken, eagerly and anxiously,
before they SHOULD, without knowing it, wound her, they had signalled
from house to house their clever idea, the idea by which, for all these
days, her own idea had been profiting. They had built her in with their
purpose--which was why, above her, a vault seemed more heavily to arch;
so that she sat there, in the solid chamber of her helplessness, as in
a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of
which she could but just manage to see by stretching her neck. Baths of
benevolence were very well, but, at least, unless one were a patient of
some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one was usually not
so immersed save by one's request. It wasn't in the least what she
had requested. She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired
flight, not merely as a plea for a mo