harlotte so happy--to have so perfectly
contented her. YOU, from a good way back, were a matter of course--I
mean your being all right; so that I needn't mind your knowing that my
great interest, since then, has rather inevitably been in making sure of
the same success, very much to your advantage as well, for Charlotte. If
we've worked our life, our idea really, as I say--if at any rate I can
sit here and say that I've worked my share of it--it has not been what
you may call least by our having put Charlotte so at her ease. THAT has
been soothing, all round; that has curled up as the biggest of the blue
fumes, or whatever they are, of the opium. Don't you see what a cropper
we would have come if she hadn't settled down as she has?" And he had
concluded by turning to Maggie as for something she mightn't really have
thought of. "You, darling, in that case, I verily believe, would have
been the one to hate it most."

"To hate it--?" Maggie had wondered.

"To hate our having, with our tremendous intentions, not brought it off.
And I daresay I should have hated it for you even more than for myself."

"That's not unlikely perhaps when it was for me, after all, that you did
it."

He had hesitated, but only a moment. "I never told you so."

"Well, Charlotte herself soon enough told me."

"But I never told HER," her father had answered.

"Are you very sure?" she had presently asked.

"Well, I like to think how thoroughly I was taken with her, and how
right I was, and how fortunate, to have that for my basis. I told her
all the good I thought of her."

"Then that," Maggie had returned, "was precisely part of the good.
I mean it was precisely part of it that she could so beautifully
understand."

"Yes--understand everything."

"Everything--and in particular your reasons. Her telling me--that showed
me how she had understood."

They were face to face again now, and she saw she had made his colour
rise; it was as if he were still finding in her eyes the concrete image,
the enacted scene, of her passage with Charlotte, which he was now
hearing of for the first time and as to which it would have been natural
he should question her further. His forbearance to do so would but
mark, precisely, the complication of his fears. "What she does like," he
finally said, "is the way it has succeeded."

"Your marriage?"

"Yes--my whole idea. The way I've been justified. That's the joy I give
her. If for HER, either, it had faile