why I so suddenly break out she'll be able to tell
him the reason."

They were stopping, and the footman, who had alighted, had rung at the
house-door. "That you think it would be so charming?"

"That I think it would be so charming. That we've persuaded HER will be
convincing."

"I see," Maggie went on while the footman came back to let them out. "I
see," she said again; though she felt a little disconcerted. What she
really saw, of a sudden, was that her stepmother might report her as
above all concerned for the proposal, and this brought her back her
need that her father shouldn't think her concerned in any degree for
anything. She alighted the next instant with a slight sense of defeat;
her husband, to let her out, had passed before her, and, a little in
advance, he awaited her on the edge of the low terrace, a step high,
that preceded their open entrance, on either side of which one of their
servants stood. The sense of a life tremendously ordered and fixed rose
before her, and there was something in Amerigo's very face, while his
eyes again met her own through the dusky lamplight, that was like a
conscious reminder of it. He had answered her, just before, distinctly,
and it appeared to leave her nothing to say. It was almost as if, having
planned for the last word, she saw him himself enjoying it. It was
almost as if--in the strangest way in the world--he were paying her
back, by the production of a small pang, that of a new uneasiness, for
the way she had slipped from him during their drive.

XXVIII

Maggie's new uneasiness might have had time to drop, inasmuch as she
not only was conscious, during several days that followed, of no fresh
indication for it to feed on, but was even struck, in quite another way,
with an augmentation of the symptoms of that difference she had taken it
into her head to work for. She recognised by the end of a week that if
she had been in a manner caught up her father had been not less so--with
the effect of her husband's and his wife's closing in, together, round
them, and of their all having suddenly begun, as a party of four, to
lead a life gregarious, and from that reason almost hilarious, so far
as the easy sound of it went, as never before. It might have been an
accident and a mere coincidence--so at least she said to herself at
first; but a dozen chances that furthered the whole appearance had risen
to the surface, pleasant pretexts, oh cert